Giving Hand

bread factory

Hecate Miller, 2007

"I used to have an interest in critical thought and now I have no such interest, though my political opinions have not really changed. I used to read books by authors such a A. Badiou and K. Karatani and now I read no such books. We distributed photocopied leaflets against the occupation of Iraq. If not to people directly we stuck them up on pillars supporting roads. We wrote subversive texts. Of course I knew I wasn't qualified and I did it out of spite. I even wrote an activist blog with the links under the headings "the damned of the earth" and "prisoners of starvation" but such gestures are futile. It was a career and a career that didn't pay. When I realised this it was over. We thought of it as a futile gesture or we thought we thought of it as a futile gesture but it turned into an empty career. When I realised it was a futile gesture I put these things away. I already had a real job and was ashamed to have had an imaginary job. It was futile: as if this message was written on a church collection plate on which we kept car parking money and the message appeared when all the change had been taken. I already knew it but the meaning had been obscured. We hung out with deadbeats and people abused our hospitality. I already had a job cleaning offices for the BNP. I had thought of it as career but it was no career and after that I didn't bother. But I was still broke and my politics hadn't really changed."

For the Love of God

Rembrandt Van Rijn The Anatomy Lesson

Damien Hirst's For the Love of God is at least a clever joke against a certain way of understanding Walter Benjamins ideas about art and its aura. The object and its artness being seperable, the object is made not banal in the manner of Schwitters but is literally a human skull; and this quality of artness is literally encrustation with diamonds.

The work does though presuppose a seriousness in the politics it falls into such that its patrons aren't seen to be in pure appreciation of its ostensible content: money/death, but at one degree's remove.

Is this work subversive? At least in Schumpeter's sense of altering the relations that constitute the local market? Only if all works of art were owned by corporations that issued shares, could we immediately deduce to what extent the production of For the Love of God has revalued other works in this genre, and if Hirst's new work validates in turn the adoption of a more bearish position with respect to Manzoni's canned shit, for example.

enterprise

Television is not only this drab kaleidoscope, but also a teacher, and occasionally a teacher of philosophy. Its lessons, if anything, have a greater veracity than those of certificated teachers. For example, the idea proposed by George Berkeley and Gorgias of Leontini, that the world is illusion, seems to affect us more when proposed through the sad history of Captain Pike in the original Star Trek:

(Captain Pike, captured by neurasthenic martians, is subjected to the vexations of a hallucinatory world. Later on, mutilated and restricted to a life support machine, he represents the manifest correlate of this: a body fit only for hallucination.)

We are faced with alternate scenarios, in which a proposition is presented in two different ways according to the sole differentiating factor: the context within which the proposition is disseminated. The proposition is persuasive when its context is a banal television programme, less so when its context is the spectacle of western philosophy. In this sense the validity of the proposition varies inversely with respect to the authority with which it is asserted. In both cases, however, the context is itself abstracted along with the proposition, and can only be imaginatively reconstructed. The tendency of the ideological mechanism constructed by the market economy is to prompt the contextualisation of the material it disseminates according to the distinct contexts of material already formally understood and material formally unintelligible, since this intuitive allocation of contexts most expediently rationalises the abstraction that the market economy passively constructs. This proposition: that the world is illusion, presented via the context of this banal television programme, contradicts this formal prior comprehension. The rationalisation of this contradiction invariably presents, albeit fleetingly, the proposition contextless and existing in itself. Equally contradictory, actually if not apparently, is the complementary deduction that the spectacle of western philosophy qua spectacle formally negates the propositions it formally subsumes.

This apparent paradox has perhaps not been previously formulated (its social preconditions being of relatively recent origin), but a number of advertising techniques are nevertheless constructed around it. Consequently I think it would be worthwhile to present in outline the anatomy of a socio-ideological system like Star Trek, how it works, and how the sale of goods can be made to depend on it, even though none of this can be adequately proven. I don’t believe there is any harm in explaining this, since it’s already done, as it were, unconsciously, and probably couldn’t be effectively reconstructed from first principles.

1. The banalised worldview of teevee is itself accepted as a banal fact. Teevee is accepted as a kind of folk culture.

Since anyone with a teevee can validate or reject this assertion I propose to restrict myself to a few comments concerning the set up and reception of teevee:

The reproduction of the premises of teevee (buildings, machines, staff employed) subsumes the reproduction of its content. Consequently teevee dispenses with whatever superfluous content would adversely affect this reproduction. So teevee is effectively banalised in respect of what it could be (in different circumstances) and perpetuates an artificial timeless present comparable to that of pre industrial folk culture. This repetitive quality of teevee, while it tends to cancel historical knowledge within its own content, also reinforces the supposition that there is this historical knowledge, though it remains exterior and unexamined.

The content of teevee can only be understood, let alone enjoyed, as the background noise of everyday life: as the folk culture of some other people, a little worse than we are. The minimum comfort of teevee is its persuasive appeal that other people really do take its stupid worldview for granted. With respect to the supposed overall culture, teevee a priori represents everything you are meant to have already understood. The alternative, heretical view, that teevee is always and everywhere simply a tool of industrial capitalism, is likewise technically incorrect; is depressing rather than reassuring; and is virtually socially irreproducible. The existence of a number of sectors of industry (for instance that selling videos of teevee programmes), testifies to the fact that people really do accept teevee at face value, but its persuasive appeal is of course more or less temporary, and also operates within a generalised boredom.

Star Trek admirably reproduces all these conceits: in no way do its makers depart from b movie standards in terms of the quality of acting, plot or scenery they present. The various episodes are also virtually unrelated to one-another such that they can be understood in any order or independently.

Star Trek also cleverly exteriorises the historical knowledge it supposes, for instance in the control panels that merely interface the unworkable, or the transporters that only materialise the programme’s immaterialiseable suppositions.

2.      Two ostensibly contradictory operations are carried out within teevee that simultaneously disturb and reassure the viewer. Teevee thus proposes a disturbing folk culture.

So, half of the economy of Star Trek consists of tactics that teevee employs routinely, if not unconsciously, and which the makers of Star Trek merely refrain from contradicting. The real art in Star Trek consists in its separation of character and context, such that the characters are reassuring (because they clearly belong to the banalised world of teevee), while their context is made disturbing (i.e. simultaneously strange and banal): an art of separation that prevents the programme itself collapsing into “art” proper. In many ways the programme is predicated on remaining unintelligible. The disturbing aspects of Star Trek have to be allocated to folk culture rather than supposed high culture for the economy to work.

In establishing strange contexts, the makers of Star Trek are not deterred from employing almost everything that its viewers might find disturbing in the 1960s: not only the world of hippies and communists, but also “high culture” art and philosophy. These discrete alternatives are routinely put together piecemeal. So, in the Menagerie episode, the unfortunate Captain Pike, captured by this race of effete technocrats, is subjected to a kind of Berkeleyan reverie; within this reverie he fights a barbarian to a soundtrack of Sun Ra type instrumental jazz. This episode concisely encapsulates the methodology of Star Trek: what ought to be disturbing (the generic violence) serves to reassure, while what ought to reassure (art music) serves to disturb.

One reason that Star Trek can be described as typifying “compassionate fascism” is that the characters are exaggeratedly straight: they strictly refrain from employing the language associated with the milieux these disturbing ideas are presumably taken from. Kirk never talks like Sun Ra or Spinoza; the prototype “hip” Spock of the pilot episode is soon abandoned in favour of his classic incarnation.

This inverted logic gets around the real contradiction in the economy of Star Trek: that makers of Star Trek could quite easily pay for experts to transpose these disturbing ideas from a dictionary of philosophy

So it isn’t so much the case that Star Trek represents the conquest by the ideology of teevee of everything disturbing outside teevee, Star Trek rather accentuates and perpetuates the unlocaliseable terror that teevee supposes.

3. The unresolved contradiction of a disturbing folk culture is rationalised as a contradiction between the viewer and the folk culture to which he/she supposedly already relates. This contradiction can then be resolved by the viewer refamiliarising himself/herself with the material, to the point where boredom supplants disquietude.

If we accept that Star Trek proposes a disturbing folk culture, we are accepting something contradictory, since folk culture shouldn’t really be disturbing, nor for that matter should it have “viewers”. But this whole paradoxical economy can, from the viewer’s perspective, be swiftly rationalised by simply buying into teevee to a greater extent. Provided the initial premises of teevee are intuitively accepted, as they must be, however provisionally, the introduction of whatever disturbing content is able to retain the status of something a priori comprehended will necessarily coerce the viewer into striving to comprehend what he/she is meant to have already comprehended, up to the point where boredom supplants disquietude. This contrived need to understand something that is abstracted, owned and branded can be simply and profitably displaced into a willingness to buy products that are likewise owned and branded. If you understand all this you are no doubt well on the way to understanding how “space energy comes from sugar smacks”.

Star Trek is notable because it achieves its disquieting effect through philosophy. It isn’t straightforward to disquiet people with philosophy but relatively easy to disquiet them with sex. Consequently it would be worthwhile demonstrating how the same techniques can be employed using sexual content.

Grameen Bank

In the letters page of The Economist of the 4^th November, Professor Richard Norgaard speculates as to why Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel peace prize rather than the economics prize:

“Perhaps the Nobel peace prize selection committee took so long because they thought someone ought to make the award given the economics committee hadn’t done so. It would be nice if the Nobel economics prize occasionally went to a practitioner instead of only theorists who impress other theorists.”

An alternative suggestion would be that the Grameen bank is a large capitalist organisation predicated on a rule that the science of economics absolutely will not accept: that the revenues of small businesses, hence businesses in competition, tend to be enough to cover materials and labour but not the cost of capital.

golden age

1. Economic theory accounts for the capitalist system as wholly determined by contradictory forces in tension. This theory instrumentally neglects the material product of confluent interests since these confluences strictly negate the premises of the theory itself. From this can be understood the conceit of those incautious affirmations that capitalist development can be neither bizarre nor bureaucratic. The inseparable and mutually determined negations of economic theory: confluences of interest undermining the premises of this theory, and its correlate; surpluses undermining these premises, by their absence affirm the rationality of the theory and by implication the political system it accounts for. In the abstraction of the particular, the rationality of the entire system is underwritten by the corresponding quality of its specific manifestations: the quality of austerity. The value that justifies this society, and consequently that by which this society justifies itself, does not reflect the potential benefits afforded by the technical means at this society’s disposal, but rather the opposite: the very poverty of these means.

2. The formerly persuasive “theory of surplus value” conveniently summarises what this society contends it is not. It is nevertheless retained as a rhetorical device by which one may portray ones opponents as irreducibly alien to this society, in enjoying a surplus product itself apparently alien to this society. The dramatic effect of this argument is not at all diminished by the deployment of a logic that undermines its own premises. So, for example, Senator Norm Coleman can, without the slightest embarrassment, accuse George Galloway of having received capitalist surplus value in the form of Iraqi oil revenues.

3. The mass media, whose ideological basis derives from the contending interests of its owners and consumer base, from an alternative perspective reiterates the ideological premises of economic theory, such that these two systems reciprocally support and reinforce each other. Despite the high level of concentration in its ownership, the orientation of the mass media is basically democratic, and opposed to the irresponsible arrogation of power by elites. The concentrated power with which the mass media is inevitably bound up is never justified outright, but rather not discussed at all.

4. A pervasive abstract necessity accompanies and authorises the particular manifestations of capitalist economy, even as these manifestations become more and more obviously unnecessary and insane, for instance the absurd oversized televisions of the nouveau riches, which attest only to a poverty inflated to grotesque contradiction; or, to give a less picturesque example, a police system where men charged with no particular crimes are wrapped in plastic and drowned by agents of the world’s leading democracies.

5. The rationality of the lives of the general population in developed countries likewise derives from their austerity: the lives of these citizens are rational to the extent that they are involuntary. In this respect cultural values have not changed from the period when the working class was universally subjected to the poverty of production. The principal article of faith demanded of the general population, and encouraged by every kind of media intervention, is the denial of any kind of reduction that would retrospectively present the existing culture in terms of surplus: as richness and not poverty.

6. The ideology of our era offers an involuntary recapitulation of the rococo aesthetic, whereby form and decoration are seen to naturally separate from each other. Since austerity qualifies rationality, a “real” popular ideology finds it’s alternative in a frothy “elitist” system, which no one is expected to give any credence to. Various public intellectuals nevertheless continue to voluntarily identify themselves with this gilded straw man. Politics is constructed according to the same principles. A pseudo popular right wing finds itself opposed to a pseudo elitist left. This is in contrast to the democratic and aristocratic factions that occupied Aristotle’s analysis for instance. Indeed, the elaboration of either of these positions today would present something of a scandal. Because ideology has been developed according to the exigencies of the market economy, the ideology of politics constitutes a secondary system obliged to use the same rhetoric as commerce. For this reason an advert for George W Bush, in its deployment of an abstracted necessity, more or less resembles an advert for pressed ham.

7. The political parties of right and left in the developed countries offer a barely distinguishable programme of fake realpolitik, differing only in their emotional response to the imagined necessity. The rattling of the tin indifferently recalls applause or lamentation. Electoral campaigns are organised as a question of personal spirituality rather than of contradictory political programmes. Do you feel guilty for what you have?  Or justified because you have nothing?

8. President George W Bush is himself the most obvious manifestation of the “popular” right wing.  During the 2004 election the Democratic Party once again organised its campaign on the basis that Bush’s widely reported ignorance and moral tractability would prove to be an insurmountable handicap. In fact these qualities are central to his appeal, no doubt partly because this is exactly how the voters are required to conduct their own lives. These qualities represent a personal austerity entirely in keeping with the national austerity of rationalised capitalism. One can only assume that the Democrats considered it infeasible to dispute George W Bush’s working class credentials. Consequently the Democratic Party organised a campaign effectively complementing that of the Republicans.

populist as pejorative

Populism, historically, meant divergence from imperial realpolitik, the way it is used today isn’t fundamentally different, neither are the interests involved.

eg  “the assassination by an animal-rights activist of Pym Fortuyn, a flamboyant, right wing, anti-immigrant populist”

This talk of populism, basically, is a moment where the dwarf temporarily appears to correct the errors of the moorish potentate, since the people who produce the newspapers would like it to be known that there’s a certain distance between themselves and the gay fascist. And there is a distance. In this and other things.

This society cannot be considered apart from its entire apparatus of impersonal communication. The methodology of this apparatus was always predicated on and served to reinforce the receiver’s sense of incompetence, but for a number of technical and historical reasons this generalised contempt rarely entered the content of that which was disseminated.

Characteristic of the fragments of ideology produced by the market economy, the populism argument has a single relationship of support, which in this case is an extrinsic relation. This populism is desirable, in a sense, but also untenable, and this untenable quality derives not from any part of the analysis, since there is no analysis, but from the receiver’s self-affirmed abstractedness. One of the methods of advertising: premises disavowed.

The standard shorthand of right wing political commentary has for a long time been the opposition:

laissez-faire – managerialism

Where the latter is denigrated in favour of the former. The paradigm in which populism can be used in a pejorative sense is fundamentally different, since populism cannot be meaningfully opposed to laissez-faire, necessarily:

managerialism - populism

This first opposition: laissez-faire – managerialism, is historically specific. It came about as a straightforward way of discrediting the managerialist model of the USSR, and was subsequently extended into a way of discrediting trade unions, the welfare state etc. But it’s merely critique, and as a theory in no way accounts for the total movement of capitalism, in which capital necessarily aggregates and in which power necessarily becomes concentrated. So subsequent to the conclusion of a particular period of conflict, we should not be surprised if those in power desire to make use of that which their propagandists formerly denigrated.

the love of art

The politics of action in our society, as it is and not as the socius of the sociologists, eventually concerns the politics of the avant-garde: officially an outdated issue. This is demonstrable, if at all, practically.

Our society is hierarchical, and also capitalistic. At the most general level originality is simply absent. The refutation of originality is only deployed at a quite elevated level. It cannot, in fact, be deployed universally.

Since we exist in this particular society, at this particular time, we are obliged to take a view on postmodernism, undoubtedly a privileged part of capitalist culture, as that which has supplanted all previous, failed, avant-gardes. Postmodernism is obviously not without its cretins, liars, mystagogues, hypocrites and opportunists, but leaving this aside, we would still expect it to have been transformed, by the logic of the market economy, into an entropic system. This is what, in effect, has happened. The critique of originality has supplanted its object on the basis of its unaccountable, infallible and absolute originality. What used to be called post-structuralism represents, fundamentally, a structural avant-garde that disavows itself as such

We are therefore justified in persisting with the analysis of the works of this particular avant-garde, which have certainly had an influence on critical thinking in general, in ways that can be both beneficial and deleterious.

As an example of a certain critical methodology, its presuppositions and consequences, it is worth considering Bourdieu and Darbel’s “The Love of Art”, which concerns itself, albeit obliquely, with the politics of the avant-garde, and itself retains, after thirty-five years, an official avant-garde status.

Bourdieu and Darbel’s thesis is as follows: the enjoyment of art is an in itself arbitrary product of education, ultimately sanctioned by the state, and not subject to appropriation outside of this sanction. Bourdieu and Darbel assert the impossibility of “education that owes nothing to education”. We should not be misled by an impulse to accept these conclusions on the basis that art is against austerity, and by implication something fundamentally useless. The question being posed is whether the individual appropriation of ideas is at all possible in this society. Art, as the particular object of analysis, could just as easily be substituted for theory, for example. The conclusions authorised would be:

1. Theory cannot be appropriated outside of the state’s own sanction

2. Owing to the state’s economic self-regulation, theory can never be appropriated against the state

These conclusions are not universally valid, but rather presuppose the complete comprehension of society by its owners. For a number of reasons this cannot be applicable to the market economy. It is difficult to judge whether or not Bourdieu and Darbel are believers, since their equation of art and religion supposes religion to be simultaneously true and false, but their sociology is ultimately an assertion of the divine government of the world.

I would like to contend that society is in not governed competently, let alone divinely, and that this conclusion, in the case of Bourdieu and Darbel’s “The Love of Art” is derived not from reality, but from their own methodology, and ultimately their status as radical thinkers.

Radicalism, as the synthesis of originality and contestation, is only meaningful in the context of a certain economy of ideas. The phenomenology of pure radicalism would be as follows:

1. Reality is subsumed by an absent idea.

2. Reality is coherent to the extent that it excludes all original ideas, since they are already formally subsumed.

3. The original idea derealises this formal supersession, but does not in itself subsume reality; the original idea qua original idea, as an attempt to comprehend reality, is still only coherent as an apprehension, not yet as something intended.

4. The idea itself becomes coherent by remaining strictly an apprehension while disavowing this condition, by becoming the pure opposition to reality coherent as apprehension, such that it no longer needs to be, in itself, an apprehension.

5. Radicalism as such generates as its compliment an imaginary antithetical order that reciprocally supports it as a meaningful idea, and whose perfection is derived in its entirety from this antithetical orientation.

It is consequently easy to recognise in radicalism a style of exposition where all kinds of imaginary qualities are attributed to whatever is opposed, provided they are conceived negatively. From this we can adduce the reasons for theoretical illusion of a coherent bourgeois society in “The Love of Art”.

Pure radicalism necessarily diverges from the Marxist system of analysis, while routinely neglecting to stress this divergence, or its implications. So in “The Love of Art”, the Marx-ish conclusion that the bourgeoisie are the occluded managers of social reality is asserted, contra Marx’s key conclusion that the bourgeoisie’s possession of social reality is always inherently unstable, without any explanation being given as to how this incompatible conclusion had formerly been reached. 

We must bear in mind, as Bourdieu and Darbel certainly do, that they participate in the management of the society they criticise. Their attack on the orientation of this society is simultaneously a defence its operational integrity:

“Only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of ‘cultural needs’ which allow a lasting and assiduous disposition to cultural practice to be formed only by regular and prolonged practice”, necessarily, “a practice which is both arbitrary and initially arbitrarily imposed”

“To grant the work of art the power to awaken the grace of aesthetic inspiration in all people, however culturally disadvantaged they may be, and to produce through itself the conditions of its own diffusion, is to sanction the attribution of all abilities to the unfathomable fates of grace or to the arbitrary of ‘talent’, whereas in reality they are always the products of unequal education”

All of which is a straightforward enough demonstration of the ethics of Kierkegaard’s counterfeiter: an ostensible opposition to a particular bureaucracy underwriting the imagined coherence of this bureaucracy, and consequently the practice that depends on it. “The Love of Art” should be understood accordingly:

A pedagogic authority: “only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of ‘cultural needs’ which allow a lasting and assiduous disposition to cultural practice to be formed only by regular and prolonged practice”.

discussion

Omar Khayam

“We are the puppets and the firmament is the puppet-master,/In actual fact and not as a metaphor;/For a time we acted on this stage,/We went back one by one into the box of oblivion.”

The start of February saw a protest outside the Danish embassy in London against the famous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

Evidently it isn’t straightforward to discern provocation from counter-provocation; the participants in this protest nevertheless offered an authentic renunciation of spectacular politics in aligning themselves with an even more degraded spectacle, itself singularly shrill, senile and vindictive. Any kind of particularly Islamic content had been carefully withheld. The violent slogans reproduced in the press, all seemingly written in the same hand, conformed more closely to valorisations of extremism as such, as the press itself understands it. It seems reasonable to suppose that although those involved in this protest were obviously vehemently opposed to the publication of the cartoons, their actual support for the beheading of the cartoonists was questionable to say the least.

The Sun headline “jail this sick nut” apropos of Omar Khayam, who had been imprudent enough to dress up as a suicide terrorist, offered a wilfully distorted analysis. The authorities, already committed to a certain affectation of naivety, inevitably followed the analysis of the Sun in taking Mr Khayam’s affectation of naivety apparently entirely seriously.  Since Mr Khayam had previously been convicted of possession with intent to supply cocaine and heroin, his immediate return to prison meant only the revocation of a license. Despite his public apology, in which he stated, credibly enough, that he had been more or less a spectator, and that consequently he had neglected to take into account his particular case history.

86 Peckham Road

Lashed somewhat by the maledictions of the bourgeois press...Kennedys Sausages.