…Scarcity, or the prospect of scarcity, creates value (no-one was rhapsodising about the tactile pleasures of printed books fifty years ago), and as English spreads from one horizon to the other like a swarm of locusts, gobbling up minor languages in a few generations, we have begun to recognise that our linguistic ecosystem is a precious and vanishing resource. The international reach of today’s markets offer unprecedented access to the many literatures of the world, yet the choices we make as consumers of literature are dismally conservative…
News
The other day I listened to an episode in the La Trobe Philosophy podcast with interest: Dr Jack Reynolds was talking about the divide between Analytical and Continental philosophers. It was fascinating, but I wondered why Alain Badiou’s name did not come up, since he frames Being and Event with a discussion of the divide, critiques both sides, and explicitly grounds his thought in mathematics (‘mathematics is ontology’).
So I emailed the podcast presenters; they got on the phone to Dr Reynolds, who responded in a brief extra episode of the podcast. (Thanks very much!) Check both the original episode and addendum here.
At the beginning, a counter-cultural phenomenon, alien and insidious, begins to spread from the East (like a weed, as Morton puts it), considered thoroughly disreputable by respectable citizens: ‘a most mischievous superstition … again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.’ That was Tacitus, talking about the early Christians, but it could just as easily be a conservative American in the 1950s looking askance at the Zen-inspired notions of Ginsberg and Kerouac taking root in cosmopolitan San Francisco.
…As the demands of capital and the relentless ideology of corporate media hem in the scope of democratically elected politicians to differ substantially from each other, personality and identity become the surrogates for real political debate. Celebrating Australia’s first woman prime minister is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves about how much difference it makes. For myself, growing up in the UK under a Thatcher government erased any illusions I may have had – as the anonymous writers of the The Coming Insurrection put it, ‘patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men’. In the 2008 Democratic primaries in the US, Clinton’s tough talk of ‘obliterating’ Iran was an attempt to deflect sexist stereotypes and prove that she had – as her loyal follower James Carville put it – the ‘testicular fortitude’ to be an effective commander-in-chief.
In the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media. The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the original – the ineffable master plan, the solemn and mysterious ways in which He moves.
In fact, the comparison between this human achievement and the processes that led to the existence of the human species would be better understood in the reverse. Not just human evolution, but the series of events that led to the conditions in which the emergence of life was possible – the distance of the Earth from the sun, the gravitational pull of the moon steadying our orbit – are contingent on an interplay of factors of immense complexity. This cosmic dynamic, if we are to anthropomorphise it, would be more aptly described as whimsy than as work; or, the better to appreciate its radical difference from human activity, as the kind of explosive creativity we witness in storms and volcanoes. What we have done in synthesising life is to copy the effect of that play by means of diligent work.
Despite the fact that Philosophy is the highest-rated subject at Middlesex, and one of the strongest in the country, management have decided to shut the department down, without even the pretense of an appeal to any objective standards. This is a clear and unambiguous example of the profit motive’s destructive effect on academic excellence; an end result of the meddling in higher education by New Labour philistines.
The campaign to the save the department can be found here. The online petition against the department’s closure has already gathered over ten thousand signatures.
The consumer-choice model of democracy tends to encourage the same behaviour from political parties as from corporations: marketing, branding, advertising and other forms of mendacity, which in turn generate cynicism and a distaste for the political system – a deserved distaste. Honesty and principle are punished; the scum rise to the top. The expenses scandal was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ordinary people don’t like politicians, don’t trust them, don’t respect them. Nor should they.
Some of us, disillusioned by other charismatic and supposedly transformational leaders (Tony Blair, in my case) or philosophically predisposed to see the changing of the guard at the top of the capitalo-parliamentarian state apparatus as a charade, did not expect much. But to the starving, a crust is a feast, and after eight years of intransigent climate denial, war crimes, atrocities, profiteering and the privatisation of war, Obama’s emollient rhetoric was music to the ears of many on the Left. Who can blame them? Once installed in office, however, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge noted at the time, ‘the issue is no longer what he is and means, but what he does’. Sarah Palin, of all people, posed the unavoidable question: ‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?’
We all remember the end of last year for the dismal outcome, at Copenhagen, for concerted international action to deal with the world’s problems. Just a few weeks before, however, another meeting took place. In November last year, the International Encounter of Left Parties met in Caracas. At that meeting, Hugo Chávez, in typically theatrical style, declared that it was time ‘to convene the Fifth International, and I dare to make the call, which I think is a necessity’.
What would a Fifth International look like? More of the same Trotskyist rhetoric, or something new and radical that, while rejecting the neoliberal consensus, does not tie itself up in dogma, recognising that all theory is contingent – that nineteenth-century critiques of capital, however brilliant for their time, are not the be-all and end-all?
The father of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, has died a few weeks before reaching his 101st birthday. From his obituary:
Dans une époque pressée, confuse, massivement portée à la veulerie et au simplisme, l’homme passait fréquemment pour distant. Tous ceux qui eurent la chance de l’approcher peu ou prou savent combien cet esprit universel, profondément attaché à la dignité de tous peuples, savait être proche, amical, fidèle et chaleureux, surtout si l’on avait su tenir le coup sous son regard, le plus acéré qui fût. Hautain? Non. Seulement exigeant, suprêmement intelligent, et peu enclin au mensonge. Cela fait évidemment beaucoup de défauts, surtout si l’on est en outre l’auteur d’une des oeuvres majeures du XXe siècle. Dans la cacophonie de l’heure, une partition exemplaire. Et l’élégance altière, à côté du solfège, d’un musicien de l’esprit.
