29 November 2004
FE Colleges
As I'm still off work, I have time to read articles about the appalling state of UK FE colleges. In my strictly limited experience (sessional teaching of philosophy/religious studies/critical thinking), it's clear there are certain massively entrenched problems without obvious solutions: the lack of desire of a large minority of students to want to attend (and what are the alternatives? getting a job? It's unlikely you'll get JSA if you live with your parents. Just how widely available are apprenticeships these days?); the bad behaviour of this minority (anything from low-level messing about, to open hostility). There's also very little support available to students - whose home and private lives often couldn't be more unhappy.
There certainly aren't enough teachers, and some of them simply hate their students without exception. But what can colleges do to be more attractive? If someone offers you twice as much money to go and teach a bunch of docile kids in a private college, it's no surprise that FE recruitment and retention is so bad, especially in London. And of course, if you spend several decades convincing people that anything vaguely communal and civil is bad and irrational, then the number of people coming forward to do a difficult job for not enough money is going to be slim. I'm amazed and impressed that anyone still works in public industry these days, when any old twat can set themselves up as a 'consultant' and seemingly earn tons for doing nothing of any use to anyone.
There certainly aren't enough teachers, and some of them simply hate their students without exception. But what can colleges do to be more attractive? If someone offers you twice as much money to go and teach a bunch of docile kids in a private college, it's no surprise that FE recruitment and retention is so bad, especially in London. And of course, if you spend several decades convincing people that anything vaguely communal and civil is bad and irrational, then the number of people coming forward to do a difficult job for not enough money is going to be slim. I'm amazed and impressed that anyone still works in public industry these days, when any old twat can set themselves up as a 'consultant' and seemingly earn tons for doing nothing of any use to anyone.
27 November 2004
Infinitely suffering thing!
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
- T. S. Eliot 'Preludes' from 'Prufrock and Other Observations'
Just went back and re-read this after finding out I was it (see post below) - good, they're good! Shame about the accusations of racism, misogynism, fascism, emotional coldness, and anti-Semitism, but oh well, glad I wasn't LOTR (sorry, Gluey). Being 'Invisible Man' is pretty good though, Esmail, scurrying round the cesspool with your anonymity intact. I think it's pretty accurate.....
Eliot is also the author of the most neurotic stanza ever written (from 'The Waste Land'):
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
This makes me think of bird-like, upper class, artistic British women in the 1920s, someone like Virginia Woolf, perhaps, twittering about and being anxious about having guests for tea or somesuch.
Thank God we're all too drunk to be like that these days, ho ho ho.
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
- T. S. Eliot 'Preludes' from 'Prufrock and Other Observations'
Just went back and re-read this after finding out I was it (see post below) - good, they're good! Shame about the accusations of racism, misogynism, fascism, emotional coldness, and anti-Semitism, but oh well, glad I wasn't LOTR (sorry, Gluey). Being 'Invisible Man' is pretty good though, Esmail, scurrying round the cesspool with your anonymity intact. I think it's pretty accurate.....
Eliot is also the author of the most neurotic stanza ever written (from 'The Waste Land'):
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
This makes me think of bird-like, upper class, artistic British women in the 1920s, someone like Virginia Woolf, perhaps, twittering about and being anxious about having guests for tea or somesuch.
Thank God we're all too drunk to be like that these days, ho ho ho.
26 November 2004
which book are you?
Turns out I'm this, quiz care of fiat lux.
You're Prufrock and Other Observations!
by T.S. Eliot
Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
THE PAIN!
Spent the past few days in a swirling mulch of pain, dreams and analgesics....not entirely unpleasant, although the pain is really too much to bear sometimes (though what does this mean? It's not like I stop existing when it gets too much). Some hideous dreams; hospital food morphing into babies that I'm supposed to take care of; searching for days and days for some drowned body in an infinite swimming pool; dark creatures trying to pull my ear away from my head (oh wait, that already happened). Can't concentrate on any work, despite deadline pressures...
Still, managed to leave Infinite Thought towers briefly last night to attend a paper at the Leningrad University of post-Adornian boy-misery on Schlegel and the Re-enchantment of Nature. Was very scholarly, but all those mystical arguments about the ineffability of the absolute and vegetal poetising just don't do it for me. Either infinity is mathematisable in a secular context or we should dispense with it altogether, surely....
Does anyone have any SAS-type tactics for the psychic destruction of pain? At around 3am this morning I tried visualising it as a biscuit which I then virtually consumed, but the illusory dispersal of the agony meant that it soon came back with a vengeance.
Still, managed to leave Infinite Thought towers briefly last night to attend a paper at the Leningrad University of post-Adornian boy-misery on Schlegel and the Re-enchantment of Nature. Was very scholarly, but all those mystical arguments about the ineffability of the absolute and vegetal poetising just don't do it for me. Either infinity is mathematisable in a secular context or we should dispense with it altogether, surely....
Does anyone have any SAS-type tactics for the psychic destruction of pain? At around 3am this morning I tried visualising it as a biscuit which I then virtually consumed, but the illusory dispersal of the agony meant that it soon came back with a vengeance.
24 November 2004
sick as a dog
Drugs worn off and boring pain kicking in. Boo. Anyway, not gonna complain too much. At least I got to sit in bed all day reading 'Crash' and Viz and not do any work.
23 November 2004
out of hospital
yer, forgot to tell you all I'd be in hospital for a few days, getting my right ear hacked to bits in a bid to have my eardrum reconstructed. Lots of blood and stuff, but at least I got some morphine and tons of codeine sulphate. The woman in the bed next to me kept me awake both nights with Exorcist-type noises (from a low RRR-RRR-RRR to a frightening AAAHHHHRRRRRR, with copious vomiting in between). But a couple of lovely visitors from time to time too....
So next time you see me, try and avoid talking to my right ear, as it's stuffed with junk for three weeks and I have no hearing. Also my tongue on the right side currently tastes like a robot. Still, the nurses were very sweet, even if they did originally give me a child's gown to wear (come on, they're embarrassing enough as it is). I was particularly impressed by the Muslim woman across from me in her attempts to not remove her hijab under any circumstances - not easy when you're having an ear operation, but she did her best.
On the plus side I read Thomas Bernhard's 'Extinction', which kept my mind off things nicely. By the time I went in for the op (24 hours after check-in) I was suffering severe coffee withdrawal, which was a headachey bitch, but apparently quite common. Afterwards, my heels hurt like hell, this is apparently from lying flat out and unmoving under a GA, kinda like a corpse. This time I did actually dream under the anaesthetic, but can't remember what it was. I wasn't particularly happy to wake up again tho, especially as I was brutally cold and shivering ('yes, get me a blanket! what do you think?!')
NoiseTheoryNoise on Saturday was pretty good, particularly red-haired k-punk, and it was sweet of course to see other bloggers Glueboot (cheers for pint, shopping-girl!) and Mark Sinker. Also met the lovely Kodwo Eshun, who I let in for free after he cunningly guessed my online identity. A weekend filled with hearing-related events....plus a drink in Shoreditch at a communist banker's flat where someone managed to accidentally push a cat off a 30-ft high wall. It broke its back legs, but a nice man from the emergency RSPCA came and took it away. A bit fucked-up tho.
Right, I'm off to go home to sleep. None of this probably makes any sense, but oh well, they messed with my balance and reality centres! and my ear is bleeding again. Lovely.
So next time you see me, try and avoid talking to my right ear, as it's stuffed with junk for three weeks and I have no hearing. Also my tongue on the right side currently tastes like a robot. Still, the nurses were very sweet, even if they did originally give me a child's gown to wear (come on, they're embarrassing enough as it is). I was particularly impressed by the Muslim woman across from me in her attempts to not remove her hijab under any circumstances - not easy when you're having an ear operation, but she did her best.
On the plus side I read Thomas Bernhard's 'Extinction', which kept my mind off things nicely. By the time I went in for the op (24 hours after check-in) I was suffering severe coffee withdrawal, which was a headachey bitch, but apparently quite common. Afterwards, my heels hurt like hell, this is apparently from lying flat out and unmoving under a GA, kinda like a corpse. This time I did actually dream under the anaesthetic, but can't remember what it was. I wasn't particularly happy to wake up again tho, especially as I was brutally cold and shivering ('yes, get me a blanket! what do you think?!')
NoiseTheoryNoise on Saturday was pretty good, particularly red-haired k-punk, and it was sweet of course to see other bloggers Glueboot (cheers for pint, shopping-girl!) and Mark Sinker. Also met the lovely Kodwo Eshun, who I let in for free after he cunningly guessed my online identity. A weekend filled with hearing-related events....plus a drink in Shoreditch at a communist banker's flat where someone managed to accidentally push a cat off a 30-ft high wall. It broke its back legs, but a nice man from the emergency RSPCA came and took it away. A bit fucked-up tho.
Right, I'm off to go home to sleep. None of this probably makes any sense, but oh well, they messed with my balance and reality centres! and my ear is bleeding again. Lovely.
19 November 2004
why...orange?
was waiting at the bus-stop this morning to go to college, and was engaged in conversation by a slightly deranged apocalyptically-preoccupied lady in her 40s: 'they teach kids how to fucking swear at school these days, don't they? but they don't teach them how to spell the word 'orange, do they? When judgement day comes, there'll be no more white, black, asian....just orange. Do you understand?'
I wasn't sure I did. But I started thinking about it: having recently developed a strong liking for the colour in the past year, I'm curious about its psychopathological qualities. Why is orange so frequently associated with whacked-out religions and even more dubious politics? Guantanamo outfits, death row uniforms, Tibetan monks, N. Irish Protestants, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh-followers, etc., etc. (Does Jung say anything about colours, Johneffay?)
Went with the Dark Prince of Gnostic Nihilism and the Mild Count of post-60s Italian Marxism to see, er, 'Bad Santa' last night. Extremely funny, and much better than the ICA exhibition (oo, Damian Hirst filled a cabinet with pills and called it 'God').
I still have no computer so am writing when I can. Weirdly, this seems to be much more often than when I actually had the machine - so this is what restriction does for production!
I wasn't sure I did. But I started thinking about it: having recently developed a strong liking for the colour in the past year, I'm curious about its psychopathological qualities. Why is orange so frequently associated with whacked-out religions and even more dubious politics? Guantanamo outfits, death row uniforms, Tibetan monks, N. Irish Protestants, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh-followers, etc., etc. (Does Jung say anything about colours, Johneffay?)
Went with the Dark Prince of Gnostic Nihilism and the Mild Count of post-60s Italian Marxism to see, er, 'Bad Santa' last night. Extremely funny, and much better than the ICA exhibition (oo, Damian Hirst filled a cabinet with pills and called it 'God').
I still have no computer so am writing when I can. Weirdly, this seems to be much more often than when I actually had the machine - so this is what restriction does for production!
18 November 2004
anguish and abandonment... horray!
Just what you need when you're sixteen and it's raining and your bus was late and nobody loves you anyway and why is the world such a mess and there's no money left for a doughnut and....I bet my students just love me and my early-morning Sartre lessons. 'So, Sophie, what do you think about the anguished realisation of your own pitiful freedom in the wake of the death of all meaning?' -
'Can I go to the loo, miss?'
We were born to run, by the way, a capacity whose cultivation is clearly crucial in Britain, what with all those horrendous fast-paced predators on the prowl (alien big cats! alien big cats!). When I was an avid reader of Fortean Times (fer sure, there was no girl cooler than me in the whole of Wiltshire), it seemed that every patch of wasteland and forest in the whole country was teeming with beasts ready to tear you (and your camera) apart. But now I realise this was probably down to the impoverished range of Fortean occurrences in Britain. I see now they've actually got some quite fun stuff in there, articles on Lovecraft, for example (should the Hyperstition kru come across this), and yes, of course, yet more pieces about mysterious yeti-type creatures and Australasian big cats....
Anyway, back to teaching. The religious studies lot get to do the cosmological argument today, and I promise I won't mention anything about any supposed link between genetics and faith.
17 November 2004
back to the exercise books...
Cheers for all the commiserations, especially the ever-welcome Namenlos (and when will we see you and your beautiful wife again?). The robbery did indeed prevent me from corrupting my 16-year-old religious studies kids with slanderous claims about faith being linked to certain chemico-genetic predispositions - because the police didn't turn up in time for me to go and teach (well, the college is two hours away). Perhaps my tagline: 'it's either God, or reason, or nothing' might need to be whittled down to: 'Ok, it's just fucking God, you sadistic bastard! HAPPY NOW?!'
Anyway, it's not all bad news, as I have quite happily returned to my old methods: one book of academically-detested Marxist theory, one pen, one notebook and several hours in the British Library.
Have also been reading Marx's 'The Holy Family', which is just one of the most relentlessly funny pieces of satire I've ever read, e.g. 'For abstraction, love is "the maid from a foreign land" who has no dialectical passport and is therefore expelled from the country by the Critical police.'
Incidentally (coincidentally..), I'm going to the opening night of the ICA's 100 Artists See God tomorrow - should we prepare ourselves for a kultur-wide theological turn? Let's hope it's a Gnostic one this time, I do so like to learn new things.
Anyway, it's not all bad news, as I have quite happily returned to my old methods: one book of academically-detested Marxist theory, one pen, one notebook and several hours in the British Library.
Have also been reading Marx's 'The Holy Family', which is just one of the most relentlessly funny pieces of satire I've ever read, e.g. 'For abstraction, love is "the maid from a foreign land" who has no dialectical passport and is therefore expelled from the country by the Critical police.'
Incidentally (coincidentally..), I'm going to the opening night of the ICA's 100 Artists See God tomorrow - should we prepare ourselves for a kultur-wide theological turn? Let's hope it's a Gnostic one this time, I do so like to learn new things.
16 November 2004
broadband...but no computer
Disaster has struck at all-new Infinite Thought Towers. I now write to you from some odd Islamic internet cafe in Hackney...
At some point between 3 and 4am Sunday night, some person or persons unknown broke into the flat and took all das dings (laptop, cash card, camera, phone, ...a bottle of whiskey). Fortunately, I think, I didn't wake up during the thieving (given that whoever did it had the audacity to eat half a banana and leave all the lights on, I doubt they would have been too averse to clocking out a little girl who came and disturbed them). 'Crackheads' said a rosy-faced policeman as a pair of them arrived 6 hours later. Thanks for that. The forensics people took the banana ('we'll swab it for DNA' - will they really do this? I would be quite impressed if they meant it), before finally smashing the window completely by clumsily trying to dust it for fingerprints.
So, anyway, with no insurance I am bereft of technology, but have escaped with corpus intact. They also stole a bag containing some Lukacs and books about class (do crackheads constitute a class? I suppose they would be lumpen, or perhaps even scum-pen, ouch). If anyone tries to sell you a job lot of sociology books, just say no! and then tell me...
Anyway, hope you can all come along to noisetheorynoise#2 on Saturday. Should be good, and you can buy me a pint to make up for losses - Suburbian friend told me last night that you should only drink out of sorrow, and that you should only be sorrowful for a reason. That's pretty profound, I thought, before downing another glass of overpriced red wine in some pointless bid to avoid accepting a world without my laptop and me in close proximity - I loved that computer, I tell you! Like a puppy, or a blanket with a puppy inside it.
Did go and see a concert last night at the RFH with Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Tony Oxley and the Anthony Braxton Quintet. It was alright, you know. I surprised myself by getting quite into it at various points - but, man, jazz does something weird to your perception of time... I particularly liked Bill Dixon doing a solo spot which consisted of his blowing air into a reverb-modulated-trumpet.
So there you have it. Stay safe, readers, and never ever involve me in a discussion about bananas. I don't want to see another piece of bent yellow fruit ever again - which is a shame really, as they constituted virtually all of the healthy part of my diet. Boo.
At some point between 3 and 4am Sunday night, some person or persons unknown broke into the flat and took all das dings (laptop, cash card, camera, phone, ...a bottle of whiskey). Fortunately, I think, I didn't wake up during the thieving (given that whoever did it had the audacity to eat half a banana and leave all the lights on, I doubt they would have been too averse to clocking out a little girl who came and disturbed them). 'Crackheads' said a rosy-faced policeman as a pair of them arrived 6 hours later. Thanks for that. The forensics people took the banana ('we'll swab it for DNA' - will they really do this? I would be quite impressed if they meant it), before finally smashing the window completely by clumsily trying to dust it for fingerprints.
So, anyway, with no insurance I am bereft of technology, but have escaped with corpus intact. They also stole a bag containing some Lukacs and books about class (do crackheads constitute a class? I suppose they would be lumpen, or perhaps even scum-pen, ouch). If anyone tries to sell you a job lot of sociology books, just say no! and then tell me...
Anyway, hope you can all come along to noisetheorynoise#2 on Saturday. Should be good, and you can buy me a pint to make up for losses - Suburbian friend told me last night that you should only drink out of sorrow, and that you should only be sorrowful for a reason. That's pretty profound, I thought, before downing another glass of overpriced red wine in some pointless bid to avoid accepting a world without my laptop and me in close proximity - I loved that computer, I tell you! Like a puppy, or a blanket with a puppy inside it.
Did go and see a concert last night at the RFH with Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Tony Oxley and the Anthony Braxton Quintet. It was alright, you know. I surprised myself by getting quite into it at various points - but, man, jazz does something weird to your perception of time... I particularly liked Bill Dixon doing a solo spot which consisted of his blowing air into a reverb-modulated-trumpet.
So there you have it. Stay safe, readers, and never ever involve me in a discussion about bananas. I don't want to see another piece of bent yellow fruit ever again - which is a shame really, as they constituted virtually all of the healthy part of my diet. Boo.
14 November 2004
furthermore....
I just noticed that I got a promotion on the weblog's blog list. I'm now in the top block with properly important writerlyvolk like a gauche and young hegelian. Obviously this is completely uninteresting for everyone other than...er me, but there you go. So, thanks Adam, all past misunderstandings placed gingerly aside...forevermore!
Christ stole my DNA
I wish someone would go to Antarctica and look at my blog - it's the only place according to the IPstat counter that hasn't had a single hit (2 from Russia!).
Anyway, we played some jazz the other night. Was very successful for about forty minutes, before some ridiculously posh neighbour came round to complain - 'you've just woken up both my kids with your bloody clarinet playing!'. If you're gonna complain about jazz-noise, you should at least get the instrument right, you pompous bastard. I mean, if you can't play drunken free jazz at 11pm on a Friday night in Stoke Newington (of all places!) what hope is there for all us bohemian wastrels? (which I'm not really, of course, otherwise k-punk would definitely not be friends with me).
Either I have to stop writing about things that actually happen to me (and possibly write a bit more about philosophy, if only to justify my inclusion on other people's blog categories), or I have to stop going out. Am tending to forget that people I know actually read this thing and consequently I have nothing to tell them when we're in the pub. Gah! Ah well, probably should cut down on the going out, what with the new place having about 13 radiators worth of heating to pay for....
Cosmological argument tomorrow! And I have to tell the religious studies kids that god is genetic. This could make the rest of the course a bit redundant.
Anyway, we played some jazz the other night. Was very successful for about forty minutes, before some ridiculously posh neighbour came round to complain - 'you've just woken up both my kids with your bloody clarinet playing!'. If you're gonna complain about jazz-noise, you should at least get the instrument right, you pompous bastard. I mean, if you can't play drunken free jazz at 11pm on a Friday night in Stoke Newington (of all places!) what hope is there for all us bohemian wastrels? (which I'm not really, of course, otherwise k-punk would definitely not be friends with me).
Either I have to stop writing about things that actually happen to me (and possibly write a bit more about philosophy, if only to justify my inclusion on other people's blog categories), or I have to stop going out. Am tending to forget that people I know actually read this thing and consequently I have nothing to tell them when we're in the pub. Gah! Ah well, probably should cut down on the going out, what with the new place having about 13 radiators worth of heating to pay for....
Cosmological argument tomorrow! And I have to tell the religious studies kids that god is genetic. This could make the rest of the course a bit redundant.
12 November 2004
radiators and broadband
moving up in the world, now I can wash dishes in hot water and stay online for more than 10 minutes. I have also putatively joined a...jazz band: myself on oboe, a saxophonist and a mandolin player. It's really not gonna sound pleasant is it? There's a good reason why 'jazz oboe' never really took off I think. Still, various parties are trying to convince me that I should stop being so down on jazz all the time, and what better way to change my mind than getting me to play some. Unfortunately, all my musical training was at the most pompous level of classicality (choir, orchestra and oboe lessons at Trinity College), so not sure I'm really gonna be able to 'swing it' with much ease ('but what's the time signature?', 'what key are we in?', 'this doesn't sound like Bach' etc. etc.). Oh well, it'll be the others who suffermost (it's much better as one word).
Reading groups are really the new getting drunk, at least as far as infinite thought is concerned. Have been to one already this week, on Lacan, women and God. Tomorrow sees a four-hour group discussion of Althusser's 'Contradiction and over-determination', plus Schelling on human freedom next Tuesday (it's like Oprah's reading club, but with more men).
Am losing my ability to hate, which is unfortunate. Have a strong desire to be affectionate all the time, sort of like a lobotomised kitten. But k-punk has a proper argument about why affection is deemed to be 'obscene' in the age of 'quickies' and self-promotion, and I think he's quite right.
08 November 2004
on the post-Christian idiocy of wanting to help others
'All love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges' - Lacan, Seminar XX.
Lately I have been trying to configure the impossible relationship between love-friendship-responsibility. I have come to the following entirely useless conclusions:
1. The single worst thing you can ever 'confess' to anyone is that they correspond, or ever corresponded, to some conceptual/emotional pre-existing whole belonging to you, pieced together via the sum total of your reading, fantasies and experiences: This only leads back (of course) to peculiarly adolescent disappointment and the endless, if sweet, shores of self-hatred. Here it is not a question of opposing the 'reality' of 'really existing' men/women to ideals - on the contrary, without these ideals there would be no possibility of ever appreciating the sheer excess of the more ideal than ideal, i.e. the really existing, perpetually surprising 'friend' (and how vacuous is this word). (Umm...I sound like a cross Derrida.) Instead, there are no types, and never have been.
Against the narcissism of one's relation to archetypes: 'I can only think of women as Madonnas or whores, it's my failing as a man', lies instead the revelation that this couldn't be more untrue - this desperate scrabbling to pledge allegiance to ready-made handy-one-size-fits-all crap psychological categories hides the fear that there actually aren't enough categories up to the task: 'you look so innocent but I know you're really a slut....you talk like a man but you blush like a girl...in the end you're just a rational monster, you're a traitor to your sex...'. All unraveled in drunken aggression to the single question: 'just what is it that you want...WHAT DO YOU WANT?!' I am increasingly convinced that we should dispense with all conversation predicated on believing that there are such things as 'persons', agency, men, women, etc. It might be unhappily amorphous, but it couldn't be any worse than the kind of discussions that currently persist.
In a related manner, what happened to Hitchcock's ambiguous modern subjects? The women you can't quite place sexually or economically....can we destroy this contemporary economy of clarity? Could it be any more obvious that the 'lock-down' mode of conceptualising people and relationships is just too easily suited to the current economic order. Why buy into the Ally McBeal schtick of the 'one', the person-product who will fulfill your every (fake) need?; refuse too the model of the direct-debit gas-bill paying couple, faithful to each other not out of love but out of laziness. There's nothing more disgusting than the disapproval of the self-appointed bourgeois sexual watchdogs. 'Well, we would never cheat on each other...'. It doesn't necessarily demonstrate your love for someone else, you know, just your selfishness. Don't peg your desire to the other like Cuba to the dollar (and you know Castro just banned it!).
2. Attempting to 'help people' is predicated on a vast black hole of libidinal confusion. There is no escaping this. If I help one person, I do so because of something specific about them (they are in some sense 'worth it'), and it necessarily takes my time away from others who need me 'less' - my investment may take on a sheen of universality, but this is really the ultimate in self-delusion: what is more self-reinforcing than the belief that you are helping someone else? Helping one man is not helping 'men', instead, all you end up with is the endless creation of 'allies' and 'enemies'. All assistance is predicated on antagonism, even, or especially, towards the person you are 'helping'. If I retract my help or refuse to enter into this economy in the name of some higher friendship (i.e. refusing to sleep with someone in the name of the 'true purity' of our relationship), and my friend recoils in anger, or they turn to someone else, the corrupt universality of my pledge is revealed in its true horror...I would have done it, you say, if I had known what you would do instead, but if I had, we would no longer be in a position to identify our actions as those of 'pure friendship'. I suggest all relationships be henceforth conducted in the open light of their mutual antagonisms and all investments made explicit.
Forthcoming: why Badiou should have chosen 'hate' and not 'love' as a truth condition.
Lately I have been trying to configure the impossible relationship between love-friendship-responsibility. I have come to the following entirely useless conclusions:
1. The single worst thing you can ever 'confess' to anyone is that they correspond, or ever corresponded, to some conceptual/emotional pre-existing whole belonging to you, pieced together via the sum total of your reading, fantasies and experiences: This only leads back (of course) to peculiarly adolescent disappointment and the endless, if sweet, shores of self-hatred. Here it is not a question of opposing the 'reality' of 'really existing' men/women to ideals - on the contrary, without these ideals there would be no possibility of ever appreciating the sheer excess of the more ideal than ideal, i.e. the really existing, perpetually surprising 'friend' (and how vacuous is this word). (Umm...I sound like a cross Derrida.) Instead, there are no types, and never have been.
Against the narcissism of one's relation to archetypes: 'I can only think of women as Madonnas or whores, it's my failing as a man', lies instead the revelation that this couldn't be more untrue - this desperate scrabbling to pledge allegiance to ready-made handy-one-size-fits-all crap psychological categories hides the fear that there actually aren't enough categories up to the task: 'you look so innocent but I know you're really a slut....you talk like a man but you blush like a girl...in the end you're just a rational monster, you're a traitor to your sex...'. All unraveled in drunken aggression to the single question: 'just what is it that you want...WHAT DO YOU WANT?!' I am increasingly convinced that we should dispense with all conversation predicated on believing that there are such things as 'persons', agency, men, women, etc. It might be unhappily amorphous, but it couldn't be any worse than the kind of discussions that currently persist.
In a related manner, what happened to Hitchcock's ambiguous modern subjects? The women you can't quite place sexually or economically....can we destroy this contemporary economy of clarity? Could it be any more obvious that the 'lock-down' mode of conceptualising people and relationships is just too easily suited to the current economic order. Why buy into the Ally McBeal schtick of the 'one', the person-product who will fulfill your every (fake) need?; refuse too the model of the direct-debit gas-bill paying couple, faithful to each other not out of love but out of laziness. There's nothing more disgusting than the disapproval of the self-appointed bourgeois sexual watchdogs. 'Well, we would never cheat on each other...'. It doesn't necessarily demonstrate your love for someone else, you know, just your selfishness. Don't peg your desire to the other like Cuba to the dollar (and you know Castro just banned it!).
2. Attempting to 'help people' is predicated on a vast black hole of libidinal confusion. There is no escaping this. If I help one person, I do so because of something specific about them (they are in some sense 'worth it'), and it necessarily takes my time away from others who need me 'less' - my investment may take on a sheen of universality, but this is really the ultimate in self-delusion: what is more self-reinforcing than the belief that you are helping someone else? Helping one man is not helping 'men', instead, all you end up with is the endless creation of 'allies' and 'enemies'. All assistance is predicated on antagonism, even, or especially, towards the person you are 'helping'. If I retract my help or refuse to enter into this economy in the name of some higher friendship (i.e. refusing to sleep with someone in the name of the 'true purity' of our relationship), and my friend recoils in anger, or they turn to someone else, the corrupt universality of my pledge is revealed in its true horror...I would have done it, you say, if I had known what you would do instead, but if I had, we would no longer be in a position to identify our actions as those of 'pure friendship'. I suggest all relationships be henceforth conducted in the open light of their mutual antagonisms and all investments made explicit.
Forthcoming: why Badiou should have chosen 'hate' and not 'love' as a truth condition.
05 November 2004
old men and pubs...a good thing
[Note: By 'old' I mean older than me, by 'men' I mean anyone willing to sit in a pub and drink beer for several hours without pause or melancholia].
Sunday afternoons in amiable Wiltshire countryside, sitting in the beer garden of a pub that was eventually to be set on fire by the owner in order to collect insurance money (he never got it, his petrol-footprints all too prominent), I listen to my father's jug band ('Hokum Focus') perform an array of old-time folk and Steeleye Span covers....thus a monster is born - the real-ale supping, old-men-smiling-at child of shambolic musical distraction (may I never have to dance with my mother to 'all around my hat' again).
Sometimes I even got to play the tambourine.
Years later I find myself inexorably drawn...the hour-eating allure of solid wooden tables, dusty old velvet curtains and beers with names like 'Dark Furnace'. And old men! The ones who drink to warm themselves up, who argue to pass the time (but would never think to smash their glass on the solid wooden table and jab it in the face of their interlocutor). The wisdom of these pub heroes, these champions of reasoning in even in the wake of five pints of 6X. I like their gentleness, their sexless kindness and complete lack of flirtation ('well, if she wants to come home with me, well she can, but there'll be no need to press her'). It's a solid life, the hours spent with old men in pubs discussing everything via the honey-coloured ocean of alcohol - the real great equaliser - men, women, who cares? All just peaceably drunk and sitting around an old oak table. There is no need to dress up for the pub, but never be without your stock collection of interesting facts: blood bounces on ice; The word 'Mrs.' Cannot be written in full; The face of a penny can hold thirty drops of water.
All together now:
All around my hat I will wear the green willow
All around my hat for a twelve-month and a day
And if anyone should ask me the reason why I'm wearing it
It's all for my true love who's far far away
01 November 2004
religion amidst the bins
'Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?' - Bertrand Russell, 'Why I am not a Christian', 1927
Incidentally, it's hard to convince students that the teleological argument for the existence of God (predicated upon purposiveness and the harmonious accord of nature) has any significance when you're sitting in a classroom in the middle of a shopping centre on a gloomy Monday morning. I talked about cobwebs gleaming in the dewy morning light for a bit, and how plants let us live in some beautiful cycle-of-life-kinda-way, but I think they were rather of the opinion that the sheer quantity of empty McDonald's packaging strewn about the world slightly undermines the argument from design. Perhaps I should take them for walks in the country, or by lakes, to marvel at the providence of wool and the prettiness of swans.
But really, building a college in a shopping centre. It's hardly elevating is it? It might make you grimly religious I suppose (there must be a better world than this one, please Lord!), but really, not good.
Still no connection at all-new infinite thought towers (no fridge or heating either, but that's a different matter). But it's ok, there's always radio 4 and Inspector Morse (both of which the proletarian puritan circus-master Monsieur K-Punk abhors, declaring of the latter: 'it's just posh people killing other posh people, isn't it? And John Thaw can't act'. Heresy, I say! As for Radio 4, well, the comedy programmes couldn't be any worse, but I like the grave, gravelly tones of the late-night newsreaders (men), or the soporific elegance of the women (mmm...sleepy). It is all a bit posh, obviously...actually, this is a point, if only 7% of the population attend public (this equals 'private' - for my American readers) school, why are these people so absolutely visible in British culture? It's ridiculous: we remain stuck in the 1930s or somesuch (actually, there was probably more social mobility and varied class representation then than now). I dunno, I'm sure you just pay for cultural arrogance rather than a better education per se. All the best people are auto-didacts anyway (they're not all autistic pederasts, Monsieur Sartre!)
Still, not only will I write about Iran soon (no really, I will), I also have a great post coming up about why I like old men and pubs (together). Hope the suspense doesn't injure you.
Incidentally, it's hard to convince students that the teleological argument for the existence of God (predicated upon purposiveness and the harmonious accord of nature) has any significance when you're sitting in a classroom in the middle of a shopping centre on a gloomy Monday morning. I talked about cobwebs gleaming in the dewy morning light for a bit, and how plants let us live in some beautiful cycle-of-life-kinda-way, but I think they were rather of the opinion that the sheer quantity of empty McDonald's packaging strewn about the world slightly undermines the argument from design. Perhaps I should take them for walks in the country, or by lakes, to marvel at the providence of wool and the prettiness of swans.
But really, building a college in a shopping centre. It's hardly elevating is it? It might make you grimly religious I suppose (there must be a better world than this one, please Lord!), but really, not good.
Still no connection at all-new infinite thought towers (no fridge or heating either, but that's a different matter). But it's ok, there's always radio 4 and Inspector Morse (both of which the proletarian puritan circus-master Monsieur K-Punk abhors, declaring of the latter: 'it's just posh people killing other posh people, isn't it? And John Thaw can't act'. Heresy, I say! As for Radio 4, well, the comedy programmes couldn't be any worse, but I like the grave, gravelly tones of the late-night newsreaders (men), or the soporific elegance of the women (mmm...sleepy). It is all a bit posh, obviously...actually, this is a point, if only 7% of the population attend public (this equals 'private' - for my American readers) school, why are these people so absolutely visible in British culture? It's ridiculous: we remain stuck in the 1930s or somesuch (actually, there was probably more social mobility and varied class representation then than now). I dunno, I'm sure you just pay for cultural arrogance rather than a better education per se. All the best people are auto-didacts anyway (they're not all autistic pederasts, Monsieur Sartre!)
Still, not only will I write about Iran soon (no really, I will), I also have a great post coming up about why I like old men and pubs (together). Hope the suspense doesn't injure you.
