a modern prince

The Times interviewed General Musharraf. The propaganda element of this article, from the decision to commission an interview with this unelected leader and not others, is no doubt to show the General somewhat domesticated; if not justified at least putting his side of the story. The idea of dialogue can be connected with the General. An intimacy of sorts is established.

There's also the ludicrous sub-editing:

"Hard man in a rocky place"

"He’s the West’s night watchman — an Islamic leader holding the flanks in the front line of the war against terror. His country harbours Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But is Pakistan’s President Musharraf doing enough — or is he fomenting civil war?"

(as if the perfect nightwatchman was a fantasist:)

"The exchange illustrated one of the problems Musharraf’s critics have consistently complained of: that when the truth is inconvenient, he simply tends to ignore it, crossing the frontier from fact into fiction as nonchalantly as he once ordered his troops to cross the border from Pakistan into India at Kargil. This is very evident in his memoir. As a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal noted, “believe little of what you read… Though there’s much the book doesn’t tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one”.

If Musharraf’s book was accused of having an inventive approach to the facts, it was also widely said to be, as The Economist put it, both “boringly boastful” and “bafflingly rude” about the leaders of other countries. The first time that the general showed either of these tendencies during our conversation was when I asked him what he felt when the world’s press published photographs of Dick Cheney lecturing him during a recent visit to Pakistan. At this, the general showed a brief flash of his famous amour-propre. “Dick Cheney never wagged his finger at me,” he said, in direct contradiction of pictures beamed across the world. “People may say that, but in fact… Dick is rather a quiet man. A great listener. I talked 90% of the time.” There was an irritable pause. Then the general added: “Everyone thinks we had a dressing-down. It’s not true.” Another pause, then: “At official levels there is total understanding between the US and Pakistan. We’re together in the same coalition. There can be differences, but…” He left the sentence unfinished."

Futurism

Suppose Futurism performs two contradictory operations, that we could call humanisation and dehumanisation, and suppose the combined effect of these operations was a kind of empty religious art.

Walter Benjamin's reduction of Marinetti's manifesto on the Ethiopian war demonstrates Futurism's effect quite purely:

"For twenty- seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.... Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art . . . may be illumined by them!"

Its processes:

1. Humanisation

Marinetti's surrealist in this way: that he effectively takes for his unconscious things that really belong to the wider social world. This happens first of all with his Jarry pastiche Roi Bombance, written as if Jarry had the legal status of an imaginary friend. We can applaud this disregard for the copyright laws. It's here again in this piece on the Ethiopian war, Marinetti effectively usurps the position of creator, as sanctioned in bourgeois art, but here with respect to a vast apparatus of death.

2. Dehumanisation

What Badiou calls formalism:

"On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms."

...a recognisable tendency, is I think really a tendency to dehumanisation in art. There's no intrinsic inventory of forms with an implied succession, rather "newness" is here more an effect of form: "new architecture, like that of the big tanks" etc. This would relate formalism to the baroque, which Benjamin tells us "knows no eschatology". The market evidently dictates that art ought to be inhuman.

In the first case the artist stands in front of this alienation effect, in the second he tries to disappear behind it. In the situation where both operations are effected simultaneously the result is something like the genderless reproduction of the inhuman. This is how I'd want to introduce the subject of modern architecture.

Inequality

To what end is class, a category basic to capitalist society, treated under the heading "inequality" e.g. in the research of the left liberal Joseph Rowntree Foundation? This abstract "inequality" in a way suggests its opposite: quantitative inequality through qualitative equality; as if this society was an unfortunately inequitable version of socialism, and as if the only sociology thinkable was that of "economic man", (uncoerced and uncoercing, unaccumulating). Society is here found unfair not structurally, but in an inessential way; as if only "decoratively" unfair, on account of its practical efficiency (this is almost suggested). Thousands of homeless people affirm this society is not socialist.

class composition in Britain: 2001 census information

"The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) is the replacement proposed for the Registrar General’s ‘social class’ classification. It places people into a socio-economic category based on their occupation and certain characteristics of the work that they do (whether they are an employer, self-employed or an employee; whether or not they are responsible for supervising others; and the number of employees at the place of work). Of the classifications for people in work, the highest group is NS-SEC 1,‘Higher managerial and professional occupations’, and the lowest is NS-SEC 7, ‘Routine occupations’.The NS-SEC classes are listed with the population in 2001."

1. Higher managerial and professional occupations (3,182,614) 8.46%
"Doctors, directors of large organisations, clergy "

2. Lower managerial and professional occupations (6,990,083) 18.59%
"Journalists, nurses, school teachers"

3. Intermediate occupations (3,532,894) 9.39%
"Travel agents, police officers (sergeant and below)"

4. Small employers and own account workers (2,626,067) 6.98%
"Farmers, taxi drivers, hotel managers"

5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations (2,687,927) 7.15%
"Train drivers, electricians, bakers"

6. Semi-routine occupations (4,393,965) 11.68%
"Scaffolders, traffic wardens, dental nurses"

7. Routine occupations (3,410,122) 9.07%
"Building labourers, waiters, cleaners"

8. Never worked and long-term unemployed (1,404,188)3.73%
Never worked (1,021,800)
Long-term unemployed (382,388)

Not classified (9,379,577) 24.94%
Full-time students (2,648,991) 7.04%
Not classified for other reasons (6,730,586) 17.90%

Total (aged 16-74) 37,607,437

Saatchism

The dominant cultural paradigm in Britain now, and perhaps too in 1979, reflecting the coincident practices of the culture industry and the ideological bases of neoclassical economics, is the individualism of the atomised society. The credibility of this individualism as a realistic explanation of society depends on the absence of those features that were understood to characterise earlier versions of class society:

1. Coercion
2. Accumulation

Saatchi and Saatchi's indefinite dolequeue presents a horrific accumulation of the indigent, reminiscent of the legendary breadqueues of the eastern bloc. But it doesn't so much ask the spectator to choose the most realistic response to the phenomenon of unemployment, as to choose the metaphysical system that retroactively presents this unemployment in the most acceptable way. Thatcher's metaphysics won the day.

a Miracle Play Herod

(Max Stirner at least seems to have noticed that Hegel's historical scenes are largely populated with papier-mâché figures)

Athlone Contemporary Thinkers etc: an industry exists producing these books about politics that convince not through their appraisal of real political structures but rather through the adoption of a style and tone that suggest a real political theology, as if such a thing were possible. In this arrangement the properties afforded to a single figure, here the writer, work to suggest a whole metaphysics, which in turn extends and frames the work itself. Versions of pastoral can do something similar: using single figures or figures in small groups to suggest coherent classes. Of course these works aren't immune to the effects of bureaucratic processes (alternatively "the effects of the market") - and so the slogan "imminence in philosophy" - a refutation of these arrangements, is effectively promoted in exactly this way. This doesn't make it a bad slogan though.

Here's a sort of explanation from renaissance drama:

1. Falstaff suggests a Plantagenet underclass, in the same way as Žižek suggests a class of theologians. In the case of Dr Žižek a few real or imagined novelties, or perhaps novelties with respect to the everyday language of the media, imaginatively suggests the efficacy of an imputed science that does not need to be shown. Likewise the incongruity of Shakespeare's Falstaff as an underclass figure is used to suggest the properties of this underclass. This unusual, disturbing quality is I think what Empson's getting at* in objecting to the "tender attitude" shown toward the latter Falstaff or the popular Falstaff. His argument recalls the notion of "compulsion anxiety" - pleasure (in this case) achieved through the repetition of an experience that's initially distasteful. (Advertising often takes advantage of this sort of process).

2. An incongruous figure suggests a coherent other class better than a figure typical of that class. Common paranoia can be left to construct around the few strokes drawn a coherence that can only be really shown in a truly pedestrian way.

*"It is as well to look at Falstaff in general for a moment, to show what this tender attitude to him has to fit in with. The plot treats him as a simple Punch, whom you laugh at with good humour, though he is wicked, because he is always knocked down and always bobs up again. People sometimes take advantage of this to view him as a loveable old dear; a notion which one can best refute by considering him as an officer.

I haue led my rag of Muffins where they are pepper'd: there's not three of my 150 left alive, and they for the Townes end, to beg during life

We saw him levy a tax in bribes on the men he left: he now kills all the weaklings he conscripted, in order to keap their pay. A fair proportion of the groundlings consisted of disbanded soldiers who had suffered under such a system; the laughter was a roar of hatred here; he is "comic" like a Miracle Play Herod."

- Empson Some Versions of Pastoral

classes

There might be some mileage in analysing the work of writers like Nick Cohen in a "Hegelian" way. Cohen's What's Left isn't really of or for the working class, its closer to being a book calculated to irritate anyone who belongs to the working class and reads books about politics, i.e. its ostensible target audience; even as disinformation it is useless. Nor can one imagine the plutocrats for whom Cohen works finding anything useful or even cheering in his miserable hack work. It truly appears as bourgeois ideology reproduced through an imagined version of its implied ideal recipient.

Obviously the rabbit eater is partly a joke, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be accurate. For this reason I'm trying to locate some proper statistics for class composition in Great Britain. These are some statistics for the US, from Dennis Gilbert The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality (2002):

Capitalist class 1%
"Top-level executives, high-rung politicans, heirs with incomes in the top 1%"

Upper middle class 15%
"Highly educated, most commonly salaried, professionals and middle management with large work autonomy"

Lower middle class 30%
"Semi-professionals and craftsmen with a roughly average standard of living. Most have some college education and are white collar"

Working class 30%
"Clerical and most blue collar workers whose work is highly routinized. Standard of living varies depending on number of income earners, but is commonly just adequate"

Working poor 13%
"Service, low-rung clerical and some blue collar workers. High economic insecurity and risk of poverty"

Underclass 12%
"Those with limited or no participation in the labor force. Reliant on government transfers"

some versions of pastoral

his appearances on each take on a different character

William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral manages to be a book about organised mendacity that avoids reproducing the overwrought tone that distinguishes, almost without exception, the successors of Friedrich Nietzsche. It worked this way, at least acording to Empson:

"The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). From seeing the two sorts of people combined lime this you thought better of both; the best parts of both were used. The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in. This was not a process that you could explain in the course of writing pastoral; it was already shown by the clash between style and theme, and to make the clash work in the right way (not become funny) the writer must keep up a firm pretence that he was unconscious of it."

Pastoral was always for the rich. So another way of describing its effect is that it refuses to present a particular figure, that of the poor man deformed by the politics of the rich; and it's to this end that the poor are imagined how the rich ought to be. Empson is, effectively, reproducing the logic of psychoanalysis without its presuppositions, to the effect that pastoral can be said to be built around the repression of this idea of the poor being cramped or injured by these politics.

(applied psychoanalysis was then in vogue: "Ernest Jones' essay on Hamlet, which may perhaps have caused Mr Eliot to jettison the play in his later essay, brought out a very far-reaching use of double-plot methods and introduced at least one valuable technical term; in "decomposition" "one person of complex character is dissolved and replaced by several, each of whom possesses a different aspect of the character which in the simpler form of the myth is combined in one being".)

Consequently, where the statement of class distinctions is inevitable, it's normal to show the poor as an idealised version of the rich, so that for either group the personality appears to be formed according to a logic that's indifferent to politics. It could be done another way; if class distinctions weren't stressed, a similar feeling could be produced by showing an extravagant degree of difference.

Empson describes a genre that gives pleasure, or more properly happiness, since pastoral is aligned with stoicism, or represents a more decorative version of it. It's also close to the effect of modern media in that (what we could call) its "first movement" is to invite condescension.

In any case, this is Empson's discussion of the emergance of the "independant individual" of bourgeois society, in relation to the sonnet "I am a little world..." of John Donne that:

"though without indifference to a universal right and wrong, takes the soul as isolated and independent; it is viewed as the world in the new astronomy, a small sphere, complete in itself, safe from interference, in the middle distance. The idea that you can get right away to Americs, that human affairs are not organized round one certainly right authority (e.g. the Pope) is directly compared to the new idea that there are other worlds like this one, so that the inhabitants of each can live in their own way. These notions carried a considerable weight of implication, because they lead at once to a doubt either of the justice or uniqueness of Christ. It was bad enough when all the Chinese were certain of hell because they had not been told of the appearance of the Messiah, but to damn all inhabitants of other planets on this count was intolerable. On the other hand, if Christ went to all the planets his appearances on each take on a different character; it is a more symbolical matter, and you can apply the ideas about Christ to anyone who seems worthy of it. This was in fact done, though with an air of metaphor. Beyond that heaven which was most high adds that heaven, if it is there at all, is now safely far off; it is difficult to reach across from either side."

Daleks

Mark K-Punk on the psychology of the ruling class:

"Class power maims at precisely the same moment that it confers its privileges, which is why, in my experience, so many members of the ruling class resemble Daleks: their smooth, hard exterior contains a slimy invertebrate, seething with inchoate, infantile emotions. Dominic is quite right to insist on the distinction between inner phenomenological states and social confidence. The ruling elite will often be in states of profound inner turmoil (which states they often believe are terribly interesting, even if they are tediously generic); yet this doesn't affect their social confidence a jot. The behaviourist philosophy of Gilbert Ryle may prove surprisingly useful if we want to understand how this is so. Ryle's dismissal of the 'ghost in the machine', his claim that there was no inner entity corresponding to the Cartesian notion of mind, might well have been polemical overstatement, but his emphasis on the external and behavioural quality of mental states is essential to understanding how class power operates."

...which I think is an excellent piece of writing. It illustrates a problem vividly and concisely: economic forces; the Cartesian notion of mind; an image from popular culture concretely relating these ideas. We're then left to decide how applicable this model is. Objections to this argument could be made on various grounds:

1. Ethically: The pronounced gap between esoteric and exoteric presentations of self in Mark's model conforms quite closely to fashionable Lacanian ideas about psychology. Mark, however, isn't applying it universally, but only to one social group. This simple conceptual modification presents a psychology quite different, affectively, to that of Lacan. Instead of the obligatory chorus pronouncing that we are all suffering, one hears, if distantly, the catcalls of the mob. It seems unfair.

2. Aesthetically: Undoubtedly the figure of the Dalek does serve to poetically represent Descartes' theory of mind. But one has reservations as to whether a character from a television series is a philosophically appropriate object of contemplation. Can we really place the Dalek on a pedestal beside Lacan's heuristic figures?

3. Logically: Statistical research in psychology is of course dominated by institutions with their own political interests, which in this case are likely to coincide with the interests of the ruling class*. One could, nevertheless, extract concrete positions from Mark's observations and evaluate them with reference to the available literature.

*we need a consistant definition of this term "ruling class", which can be stretched to mean: those who give orders, so including the overseers of the working class; the upper middle class, including those who don't give orders; capitalists and state administration; or just the capitalists; or the ruling class in the last instance, the Generals and Chiefs of Police.

heuristics 2

Yesterday's Guardian reports an official death toll for the Islamabad Red Mosque siege of fifty eight: eight soldiers, fifty militants. Acting mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, in touch with local television via mobile phone, had earlier reported deaths in the hundreds even before the Government's final assault. Today's China Daily puts the figure at 102. Mr Ghazi was killed in Tuesday's attack having already predicted "my martyrdom is certain now". The violent end of this confrontation was probably inevitable from the first shots being fired at security forces from inside the mosque.

The Government raid that degenerated into the siege occured in response to escalating para-police activity by "hardliners" associated with the mosque. The BBC describes these militants as being involved in:

"a morality campaign which in recent weeks included the abduction of police officers and people accused of running brothels, as well as raids on music and DVD shops."

...to which the Government initially responded in a conciliatory way. The adoption of a more confrontational approach (to what are blatantly crimes) followed complaints from the Chinese Government concerning mistreatment of its citizens.

Clearly this was a complex situation. But one is immediately struck by the senselessness of the militants' acts. Did they really believe they they could win? Wasn't their position unrealistic?

It's worth considering how these events are replayed through the media. There's always potental for ordinary bias and misinformation, but there's also the matter of journalists and editors making a complex event intelligible in a short article.

This is the first paragraph of an article from the BBC News website written at the start of the siege:

"Barely two weeks ago, Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, was battling for his political survival. The war drums being beaten by the opposition at home were reaching a crescendo. His battle with the country's chief justice had taken a serious toll on his image as a military man who loathes the pettiness of everyday politics. More importantly, perhaps, his Western allies seemed to be getting increasingly impatient with his seeming inability to deal decisively with Islamist extremists. All this seems to have changed dramatically over the last three days, after Gen Musharraf gave his administration the green light for dismantling a radical seminary located in the heart of capital, Islamabad"

...which is to present the confrontation between Musharraf and the Islamists in terms of an index that mediates between them. No information about the parties needs to be supplied, only the relative movements of the index, given the presupposition that the interests of the contending parties are strictly antithetical.

(As if there were two balloons in a box, and as one is inflated, so the other is compressed.)

This is a coherent heuristic system, useful in some ways for passing on information, because it dramatises. But in this case a supposition is introduced concerning the antithetical orientation of these two parties, and it's intoduced (I believe) methodologically, in order to help the story along; as it were "unconsciously". This supposition may be fallacious.

Mainstream opinion suggests a relationship between Pakistani secret services and these Islamists, at least tacit approval. Imran Khan, writing in The Guardian asks:

"A number of questions arise. Why was action not taken immediately? How were militants and arms able to ge in under the gaze of the police and intelligence services? And why were other measures, including shutting off electricity at the mosque, not exhausted earlier?"

al Jazeera asks a similar question:

"In Pakistan – governed by generals for more than half of its sixty-year history - just what is the relationship between mosque and the military? "

Hotelling's spatial duopoly model

Why are New Labour and the Tory Party so much alike? And are they really reflecting public opinion? Or, why are Coke and Pepsi alike?

This is a two part problem: a qualitative problem of product differentiation and a quantifiable problem of competitiveness. Harold Hotelling's spatial duopoly model, of 1929, attempts to solve this problem by substituting this qualitative differentiation with a type of quantifiable differentiation: hypothetically the spatial distance between rival firm's plants. Consequently we can consider a purely mathematical system relating product differentiation to competitiveness. So if we know something about one of these factors, we can make inferences about the other.

Suppose for instance two stalls selling flowers are set up alongside a highway, and alternately decide their prices and location along this highway. Potential customers are evenly distributed along the highway but the distance they are prepared to walk to buy flowers depends on two factors: price and distance*. Each flower seller is therefore in a position of seeking to set their price and location along the line to maximise their profits. But their strategy is ultimately dependant on what the other seller does

(*I've tried to make this picturesque: Hotelling talks about unit cost and transport cost)

Hotelling's mathematical solution of this problem gave the conclusion that both firms would acheive higher profits than under perfect competition and would tend to minimise the degree of product differentiation. In Hotelling's famous phrase they would compete "back-to-back" in the centre of the market.

Now, unfortunately subsequent studies, following d'Aspremont's revisions, have demolished the mathematical basis of Hotelling's reasoning. There isn't a pure strategy solution to the game Hoteling actually specifies; and variations to the Hotelling game are seen to result in deliberate product differentiation, and again profits above those determined by perfect competition.

It's possible Hotelling was thinking the transport cost accrued to the firms (but didn't state his presuppositions this way), in which case I believe his conclusions about product differentiation are justified, though it's hard to imagine real world circumstances to which this model could apply.

structuralist pornography

homo lacanianus

For the committed postmodernist, what's interesting in Slavoj Žižek's articles in the Washington Post isn't so much their content, but the politics of their style. This is the introduction to an article Žižek contributed to the Washington Post of the 24th March this year:

"Since the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques?"

...which is really antiphilosophical: presenting a tangle of discursive elements unattributed to any speaker. For whom is moral outrage mixed with doubts? Who is vacillating over whether claims apparently extorted from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed under torture can be trusted? Who wonders if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's vanity precedes his humanity, or vice-versa?

The affectivity of this paragraph is the affectivity of structuraism. By structuralism I mean philosophy not as a practice, but as a transcendental structure.

Structuralism is first conjured in this opening paragraph, with the gaping discrepancy between Žižek's philosophical credentials and his antiphilosophical practice. His statement is a variation of Baudrillard's practice of presenting an inverted truth and alongside it a fantastic justification. The complete inversion of truth suggests the infinite extension of philosophy: a structuralism.

Žižek continues:

"It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of legality. We thus have de facto "legal" and "illegal" criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration.

Mr. Mohammed has become what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls "homo sacer": a creature legally dead while biologically still alive. And he's not the only one living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law."

...working the schema a different way. Perhaps Žižek intended only to advertise the work of his colleague, arch antimaterialist Giorgio Agamben. Here, a tangible problem concerning institutional inconsistancies is given a fantastic solution. To the reader perhaps inclined to query this line of reasoning, references are duly produced (Agamben: homo sacer). This referencing is important because Žižek here can only hint at the properly opaque style of his books.

(the apparent legal problem stated above is in fact soluble: in US law evidence extracted by the state under torture is inadmissible)

Again what's suggested is a version of structuralism; and this is what's important for the newspaper. Because it allows the reader to suppose there's (so to speak) another level of discourse above that of the newspaper, authorising and correcting what the newspaper has already said.

The affectivity of structuralism is built around the logic of (pre whig era) conservatism. Structuralism isn't selling conservatism but it does dramatically ask: what if conservatism is after all reasonable? It restates the idea of a mysterious quasi-divine social order, not as the basis of political commitment but as a horrifying possibility undermining political commitment. It's surely of a piece with the vague politics of the middle class; predicated on a worried sort of liberalism. But again it's not too far from conservatism proper, which was always an orthodoxy of absent arguments; the arguments of conservatives being nearly always bad (there's also a relation to masochism).

The tendancy of the newspaper reader to countenance every kind of insult, albeit to only a small degree, probably derives his everyday use of two incompatible forms of argument:

1. ordinary arguments from experience

2. "reverse induction" arguments such as are required to understand newspapers*

but it truly is only the middle classes whose permanent tutelary role allows them to dream so profoundly the bureaucratisation of all social practice.

* i.e. what I later call arguments based on "naturalistic-inductive" logic

suggestion

Reproducible pornography is a discourse thats affectivity derives from the apprehension of a disturbing social reality outside its diegetic plane.

This pornography can only suggest, because it cannot realise:

1. the existance elsewhere of a general social pathology (along the lines of Foucault's scientia sexualis)

2. the existance of a real world of libertinism likewise outside pornography

(there is no libertinism, only a discourse about libertinism)

The affectivity of pornography is built around a double bind: pornography both incites and censures a libertinism it doesn't really relate to. Libertinism is here determined twice: as substance of indictment and as protocol of experiment.

For this reason the current form of reproducible pornography is probably vulnerable to gratuitous parody, as all commodities are vulnerable to gratuities.

symptômas

a new survey asserts! a new survey asserts!

Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that the philosopher lives under the sign of the intellect, as the prostitute lives under the sign of sex. The popularity of books such as those by Slavoj Žižek suggests that the bourgeois consumer often feels he lives under the sign of his mysterious pathology.

The consumer base in this country consists predominantly of a single class of petty functionaries, who, though they do not own the means of production, are permitted to call themselves bourgeois, or, if they are not permitted to speak, may feel ashamed in the name of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders have followed their gods in ceasing to speak to them directly. Their society is dominated topographically by capitalism and culturally by hearsay.

The vogue for a repackaged psychoanalysis, a psychanalysis cut into bits and redistributed through magazines, surely derives from the bourgeois consumer's horror and fascination with his own image as it appears distorted in the commodity spectacle. Ceaseless pronouncements on the abstract necessity of every aspect of his life, along with the miserable condition of this life, undoubtedly suggests to him that it is his own psyche, the centre of his universe, that is in really riddled with neuroses.

Capitalist mass culture, though hegemonic, is nearly always presented as something subsidiary, or marginal, as if some alternative existed. This ersatz marginality derives from its reproduction through the commodity system. Life is seen to circulate around an absent dominant. The counterpart of this discourse in topography is airport architecture: transit without destination. The reproduction of social roles tends also to the reproduction of marginality. There is no reason for these roles to be consistant with a conscious totality of life. Society takes on the character of the workplace. The psychoneurotic imagination serves to compliment and otherwise explain life as an endless series of preludes to living.

(intertitles for a silent film)

heuristics

Here's a story about television:

It's possible that the history of television does represent (though perhaps not in Badiou's sense,) the process of a truth; that intelligibility can operate without any particular context. The effect of commodity reproduction on the content of television, especially on advertising (where a lot of innovations were made), has been the erosion of those elements borrowed from other artforms that have proved unnecessary for the continued reproduction of television. Television has abandoned the contextualisation still found in theatre. In George Trow's phrase it presents The Context of No Context. Television almost invents, for its viewers, a second heuristics, required to understand or gain pleasure from its evolved form: a new science of interpretation. It's theatre disembowelled by the effects of competitive markets.

Instead of establishing the relevant, in relation to an established culture, television sets up a proxy context, or, more precisely, the viewer learns to construct a proxy context from habitually televisual television. A proxy context is formed by attributing, to an abstracted situation, interests or desires to whose antithetical struggle the situation relates. Television very often chronicles changes to a situation without describing this situation. The viewer learns to understand this (and of course it doesn't extirpate their normal thinking), but this system of heuristics, prompted by television, is strictly speaking illogical, and probably ends up exerting some influence on real life. The viewer is defined by an abstract necessity, a necessity without an object. And this apparent contradiction offers another angle of attack for advertising.

(All this probably dates back further, to the first mass produced newssheets. I'm tempted to date it to the point when Novalis decides to animate, as it were, Fichte's non I.)

Today's newspapers* actually do have something relevant to say, you have to skip to the respective entertainment sections to see this sort of effect. But there's some of this in Mr Blair's resignation: a discourse built around an imaginary consensus, completely divorced from the politics to which Mr Blair has directly contributed.

*i.e. the newspapers of 27th June 2007: the day of Mr Blair's resignation.

Introduction to the Female Brain

I was saying something about typologies; "ornamental" typologies and how they work, though the explanation I gave was a bit sketchy.

Luann Brizenden's The Female Brain is the most visible recent example of this genre, if not the most pernicious. This book makes extravagant false assertions about human psychology, claiming quite illusory differences in the mental pathology of men and women, to the extent of imagining the two sexes as distinct types or species.

The types outlined in The Female Brain have no basis in fact: they're more akin to the types outlined in astrology, but they borrow, as it were, their credibility from the natural sciences.

After Deleuze we can say that there aren't "essential" and "inessential" ideas. There are, however, different ways of conjugating ideas, and so different ways of conceptualising the fact that there are two sexes. These differing conceptions affect the apparent essentiality of there being two sexes. One idea of the sexes has the sexes limited to two sexes: essentially two sexes, as operative in the process of the reproduction of life. But conversely it's possible to conceive the sexes as categories containing no internal factor limiting their proliferation, thereby allowing us to conceive a third sex, a fourth sex, and so on. The two sexes can either be strictly a binary pair or the only extant survivors of a larger set, of which the other members are absent. We don't require differences in fact for this discrepancy to operate, but only in degree of abstraction, assuming essential always some abstraction.

The Female Brain insists its types or species: the supposed "male" and "female" brain, function as a binary pair in the same way as do the sexes, considered as part of the process of reproduction. But these types aren't, in fact, consistant with sexual difference: rather the typology borrows the attribution of an essential binarity from the concept of the two sexes. So, at first glance, the "male" and "female" brain appear as a necessarily binary pair, rather than two arbitrary designations from a limitless set of arbitrary designations. (In this respect Brizenden is more convincing than Jung).

But this also alerts us that The Female Brain is an aesthetic work and not a scientific work. It's really inviting the reader to identify with one type of brain against the other. The designations "male" and "female" brain aren't really credible in relation to an outside world; in terms of evolution, for instance, but only in relation to each other. They are characters in a kind of novel. They're described in a static way and motion is given to the whole thing by the reader questioning the validity of the structure, alternately seduced and repulsed by this description.

This is a caste system. From identifying (himself or presumably) herself with one of the types described by The Female Brain, provisionally and tentatively, the reader is prompted into (what used to be called) "profound meditations" on the possible "divine government of the world." The Female Brain reproduces the affectivity of religious explanations of society, where social institutions are imagined as inevitable, onerous, arbitrary: a strange mixture of necessity a contingency such as is found in de Quincey's ideas about the Hindu system:

"even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time"

(this pleasure in anachronism is inherent in all religion)

The Female Brain is an introduction to archaic thinking, though it apparently belongs to a different genre. In some ways it's a counterpart to the recent practice of remodelling the entrances to old buildings in the style of airport architecture (e.g. the National Gallery, London).

It's worth considering Jung's typology alongside Brizenden's because while their respective typologies work in the same way, the "types" they describe are different. The system works independantly of its content.

Creative Taxonomy

feeling/thinking

A Christian told me that God loves taxonomy. It's a necessary practice, of course, for concretely living in the world. But more often, I think, where taxonomies proliferate, seperated from actual practice, yet inviting this solicitude, they constitute an ersatz science, and an impediment to science. They represent a mannerist, or purely ornamental kind of science.

The simplest form of ornamental taxonomy has one distinction and two species, so this is what I'll consider here, though multipart taxonomies work in exactly the same way. In advertising, the elaboration of a multi-part taxonomy can sometimes be used as a hook, for instance in ads for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The most influential recent example of a two part ornamental taxonomy is probably The Female Brain, a fake psychology book. Another example can be found in C G Jung's late essay Approaching the Unconscious. Here Jung explains the distinction between "thinking" and "feeling" types of people:

"I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide-awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never learned to use their sense organs. They did not see the things before their eyes, hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted. Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies.

There are others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness, as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change, or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended on their sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in "today" there was no real "tomorrow". The future was just the repetition of the past.

I am trying to give the reader a glimpse of my own first impressions when I began to observe the many people I met. It soon became clear to me, however, that the people who used their minds were those who thought - that is, who applied their intellectual faculty in trying to adapt themselves to people and circumstances. And the equally intelligent people who did not think were those who sought and found their way by feeling

"Feeling is a word that needs some explanation. For instance, one speaks of "feeling" when it is a matter of "sentiment" (corresponding to the French term sentiment). But one also applies the same word to define an opinion; for example, a communication from the White House may begin: "The President feels..." Furthermore, the word may be used to express an intuition: "I had a feeling as if..."

When I use the word "feeling" in contrast to "thinking," I refer to a judgement of value - for instance, agreeable or disagreeable, good or bad, and so on. Feeling according to that definition is not an emotion (which, as the word conveys, is involuntary). Feeling as I mean it is (like thinking) a rational (i.e., ordering) function, whereas intuition is an irrational (i.e., perceiving) function. In so far as intuition is a "hunch," it is not the product of a voluntary act; it is rather an involuntary event, which depends upon different external or internal circumstances instead of an act of judgement. Intuition is more like a sense-perception, which is also an irrational event in so far as it depends esthetically upon objective stimuli, which owe their existence to physical and not to mental causes."

The taxonomy works this way: the auditor is invited to identify with one of the species established; to identify themself as a "thinking" or "feeling" type. Now, belonging to either species identifies one as possessing both the positive and negative attributes pertaining to that species (it's necessary for these attributes to be both positive and negative). The system works where the auditor is seduced enough by the positive things said about them to accord some validity to the negative things. According to the heuristic approach necessary to make the mass media intelligible, negative characterisations of the auditor are always afforded a degree of absolute validity. Also the auditor is most likely ill equipped to theorise an alternative conceptual basis for system laid out.

So, the auditor is offered this role, the role of a "thinking" type, for instance. The auditor is both seduced and repulsed by this designation, but cannot make a judgement on its validity, only partially accept it. But this partial acceptance of the application of a concept in particular, implies the validity of the concept in general. It is accepted that there is a "thinking" type, and so correlatively, a "feeling" type.

(I know this sounds idealist and cruel, but you've got to bear in mind that I'm describing the psychology of the mousetrap not the psychology of the mouse)

The effect of this is to reproduce the field of psychology in a distorted way. The division of humanity into different species, each coherent only with respect to others has the effect of:

1. obfuscating genuinely scientific ideas about human consciousness

2. offering spurious justifications for the political application of division of labour

3. eternalising and mystifying historically conditioned states of human development

4. offering spurious justification for the idea that humanity is comprehended by its philosophers, and by implication that society is comprehended by its owners

"as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever"

(subject to modification, if I can think of any better way to express these ideas)

Vygotsky

Free Omar Deghayes

”You must fight this with every ounce of energy you possess,” he said. “Because in the end, you will find that this torture is not about intelligence gathering, or ticking bombs or any other such nonsense. It is a talisman. A talisman of power. A government that can torture and do it with impunity can do anything. No law stands in its way. The very idea of the rule of law crumbles into dust. It means brutal tyranny."

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clownfish suit

"With the success of The Passion, Gibson has come as close to trademarking the crucifix itself as one can hope to get just now. Will Icon license crucifixes with James Caviezel dolls on them? And how far will the penumbra of this right to exploit spread - to any bloody Jesus who vaguely resembles James Caviezel (which most do)? As Spielberg managed to prevail in a trademark infringement lawsuit against a theme-park operator who used the word 'Jurassic' in the name of an attraction ('Jurassic Jungle') - drawing a rather elusive remainder of the almost wholly vanished commons into the rule of the master race of corporations - Gibson's film looks like an effort to draw some of the potentially profitable ephemeralities and imagery of Christianity into the portfolio of Icon's assets. The success of the film, whose underlying material is in the vanishing public domain, heralds a flood of copyright infringement lawsuits, for it will not be easy for any future creator of cultural product based on this same source material to avoid all detectable resemblance to the blockbuster. "

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