Black Sun: May 2015

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Pay attention now!

Listening to Matthew Crawford's very interesting talk (podcast online) at the LSE on distraction and the lack of attentiveness in the modern world.

First, minor point: some of this sounds derivative ('Silence as a Commons', for example, was Illich's point, way back when).

Second, minor point: he speaks in a slow, cumbersome way that isn't very engaging.

But to the meat...

How do we deal with information overload, the proliferation of images and sounds that surround us, the thousands of books, films, music we are supposed to see, watch, consume? And what does this proliferation, this luxurious and sensuous display say about the capitalist system and its attempt to catch everyone in a whirl of entertainment, a frenzy of excitement and frivolous gossip and chatter?

One way to face this reality is to turn one's face away; the negative way has always, I suppose, been an option: austerity, rejection, 'lowering the gaze'(Muslims would say), disengagement. The training of the eye, or the senses, more generally, requires the ability and the desire to not look, to not listen; in short: to discriminate and judge, to rule out, order and evaluate.

But it also-are these two stages of the same process or alternatives?-might entail a positive application of our attention to our material world and nature, to the lives of others, practices and skills. In that sense detachment is not an end in itself; it is, instead, a way of working out what kind of attachments are worthy of our attention.

You see parallels here with Marion's point about the need for icons as an antidote to two extremes: iconoclasm and the proliferation of images, about the need to see yourself, others, the world in the right light..lovingly. To be attentive, then, is not merely about possessing abstract knowledge in isolation but, instead, taking-as a first step-a critical stance to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. As a second step it is to imagine a second place.

From the economist's point of view a lot of questions are raised: does the exponential growth in choice actually paralyze us, making us less able to choose wisely? Are we actually subject to manipulation by large companies and if so what of the much vaunted idea of autonomy? If our desires are manufactured and if those desires depend on representations and our passive acceptance of them instead of our active engagement with the otherness of the world, then 'free choice' is something of a joke.

And here's the bit that is likely to most irritate the moderns: can 'submission'-to a discipline, a way of life, a set of norms- actually result in more freedom? If we continue to see freedom exclusively in the form of 'free from' the answer is obvious. But it is not at all obvious that we should think of freedom exclusively along such lines.

Also, the whole point of the attention economy is to keep us distracted, to capture our attention, Our minds and attention are a surface that can be used, bought off. With Big Data, someone recently wrote, the ideal market is a market of one (perfect price discrimination to cream off the surplus). Each new image must startle us or shock us or simply capture our imagination.

Wouldn't be surprised if advertisers use disasters on our screens as an opportunity to sell more stuff. And it goes without saying-so childishly obvious it is-that the use of scantily clad women is another way of catching our attention.

(Here there is much to be said not just about the nature/content of the image but the idea that it is fixed, dead to actual lived experience-Sennett's point. Jewish and Muslim aniconic attitudes, perspectives, come to mind here.

But Sennett may be wrong here since the 'filmic' also rivets us to the spot: think of pornography, for example. So, yes, films do provide narrative whereas the fixed image is plucked out of the flow of experience, but there is always the question of the false image, the false narrative. Hollywood's cliches are for all purposes fixed images).

The new image, the novelty item, the shock of the new, and fashion are all very useful to capitalism-as is the idea that there is no fixed essence, no human nature-a blank slate that can be filled with manufactured desires. Human nature, if it exists, is fundamentally transgressive, restless, always seeking to compare itself with more static forms, to find itself in faraway places. And related to this last point is the need to break down or disrupt narratives since they are often closed in form. What capitalism requires most of all is boundaries and the crossing of boundaries.

[Also, a reference to what looks like an interesting book: Addiction by Design].

Now, here's an interesting idea: our freedoms are actually morphing into compulsions and addictions. Again, one can think of pornography but it applies to a wide variety of habits-from food consumption, to drugs, to shopping..from television, to e-mail, to gambling. We may now increasingly lack what Avner Offer calls the 'commitment devices' -that were once bound up with religion, tradition, and cultural norms-that helped us ignore attractive short-term enticements for longer-term goals and/or more meaningful ones. In other words, we had the ability to take a step back from our desires and preferences. To lose that ability is to be a slave to one's desires.

The constant desire for instant gratification is in some sense a regression to childhood impetuousness and self-centredness or perhaps it speaks of a long-held human desire to immerse oneself in the moment, some sort of 'oceanic feeling' of forgetfulness, free from responsibility, the flux of time, and self-consciousness..ec-stasy: to not be oneself or one self and sign out, sign off, switch off. Not 'presence' but absence: to not be there or to just be all raw nerves, in the flow, the zone ('the body free of guilt,' Robert Hughes would say of some of Matisse's work).

Dyer says something similar about hotel rooms: to be in a place where you don't live but just are, a place where one just passes time, gives you a kind of freedom, the weightless freedom of nullity and perfect predictability. In a hotel room there is no time (note to self: must go back to Kraucer), just meaningless waiting in lobbies. Shopping malls, too: the architecture of no-place-like-home.

'These surfaces for rent'

Thursday, May 28, 2015

kali yuga

At the end of time there is nothing to say, and we don't know how to say it.

"We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with the lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration."

---Thomas Merton.

Camps in the sea:

'A girl, "around 12 years old" who was"very beautiful" was taken to a room by a group of men and was "not released" from the ship she recalled.'

--The Guardian.

In former times lepers and outcasts-untouchables-were kept on the city outskirts; then it was the turn of the mad and the ostracized.

Has a history of the camp been written? Why this need for confinement, for the expulsion of the impure, the degenerate, the poor, the marginal? A space must be reserved in which, as Plenty Coups recalls, nothing happened. Time does not pass, is not allowed to pass, and memory without a present and a sense of the future to offset it becomes a terrible trap ("stuck in the past"). In Hell, too, we are told that time will not pass...

When did it begin?

Before the Camps there were the Gulags (Applebaum) and before that there were the 'reservations' on which aboriginals and Red Indians were kept separate, the only freedom afforded them was being allowed to drink themselves to death. You read somewhere that the Nazis picked up the idea from the British in the Boer war (check on sources for that). Ghettos, quarters, prisons, asylums, institutions (what does it mean to be 'institutionalized'?) all affirm some deep-rooted need to banish, control, purify, keep in order and maintain lineages.

A remarkable line from Huxley (in Themes and Variations?). The British (Anglo-Saxon?) love of straight lines, (queues), and for a clean scale of pleasure and pain, can lead to political hygiene: the damned and the saved, those on the right hand, and those on the left.

What is a 'normal population'? A question for the statisticians and the state.

What was that again about 'the ship of fools'?

What does it say about our world (I say 'our' out of politeness) that people can be left to be abused and die of starvation on ships out at sea, far from the gaze of anyone? Is that so very different from America's 'dark sites'?

There's a story of horror out there but it will soon be displaced in the headlines by pictures-yes, that's what we really want-of an exploding volcano since we can then fret about the end of days when if truth be told the end has already, in some very real sense, come without us knowing it.

The Dalai Lama: "I mentioned this problem and she [Aung Suu Kyi] told me she found some difficulties, that things were not simple but very complicated."

Strange, that. You often hear the pundits say that the Israel-Palestinian "conflict" is a difficult problem when in reality it is made difficult by the working of power and the hardness of people's hearts. Occupation-in Kashmir or Palestine-is not so difficult to understand.

wild blue

This should get you there.

enter

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Flying Lizard

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains..

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead..

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed..

Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star.
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future.

--W.S. Merwin

[This reminded you of Calasso's 'American Woodsman'-the Man of the future, because he has no past, no time to see anything grow, has no patience for the slow circles that he think have bound us for so long. What is human, truly human, is the ability to break out, escape, from all that is 'given' and perhaps this amounts to the same thing: destroying what is given. ].

Which is another way of saying: we can possess time. And to possess is to control, order, manipulate and, ultimately, quantify and sell: time is money.

If Le Goff is correct then in some sense the beginnings of capitalism start with credit (must go back to Graeber). Religious condemnations of usury were not, you suspect, simply a result of such trades being considered exploitative, asymmetrical in nature ('asymmetric warfare') but followed from the presumption that human beings owned time and could trade it, could know what the future would bring in terms of gifts, productivity gains and that these 'returns' could be priced today. Contracts and other such binding arrangements are at the heart of it about managing risk, taming chance.

But here we are, with the looming environmental crisis on our backs, a shadow that is about to make a special guest appearance and we haven't got a clue. That's partly because we can't imagine an alternative future to our own glitzy present and partly because political thinking is in thrall to 'the now'. And because it's harder to think about anyone but ourselves today, it becomes harder to think about anyone in the future. The narcissism-whether fundamental to human nature or not-is now the only game in town. Show or be shown up.

In the end of the day we were only really addicted to ourselves and everyone's got their price (those two are not unrelated). We congratulate ourselves on our supposed clear-eyed intelligence that is streets ahead of the other animals but, really, is that true?

In the Islamic tradition the devil warns God, implores Him not to send down human beings to earth because they will only cause mayhem and havoc.

That, as it turns out, isn't the whole truth because it hasn't only been mayhem, but there was something there in that statement, right in the beginning, that makes you wonder.

'The best things in life are often free.
But you can give them..
Money, that's what I want'
--Flying Lizard.

'I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world's slow truth with rapid lies..
wherever you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.'
--Carol Ann Duffy.

'We'll have Manhattan,
the Bronx and Staten
Island too.'

Fire, 'the Fire,' our only future? A scorched earth policy.

When all is said and done, I think the forgotten wisdom of the Red Man will haunt America.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

The Fire and the Sun

'At the centre of the camp was a wooden platform that had fallen into disrepair and a crudely built wooden enclosure wrapped in barbed wire, more like pens for wild animals than a place suitable for human beings.'

--The Guardian.

"You're just taking the moral high ground to sound good-it sounds a little irresponsible."

--Aung San Suu Kyi.

This made you slightly nauseous:

'Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants...

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.'

--J. Gilbert.

Well, where to start with this drivel, tosh, nonsense on stilts?!

It reminded you a bit of Heaney's criticism of Larkin's 'Death is no different whined at than withstood'. Why the fuck should anyone listen to a poet?

But here's the thing. Firstly, it's mighty presumptuous to think that anyone knows or could know what "God wants" and it becomes very difficult to talk in that language if you think of not just the Camps, the massacres, genocides, mass rapes but all the tremendous amount of daily human suffering there is in the world and that there has always been. Is one forced to say that "God wants" that as well? (Thoba!)

Secondly, underlying these lines is the sneaking suspicion that the word 'our' is italicized:
'But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants...', as if to say, "Fuck you, Buddy" (John Nash).

And what is he actually saying here? That suffering is inevitable (if not here, then somewhere else) and therefore we should concentrate on our enjoyment?

'But don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?"
"No," [John] Cage replied, "I think there's there's just the right amount."

--from Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms.

'There will always be music'.

Well, yes, but how can one really enjoy it in good faith? [More generally, this is a question that we are only occasionally honest enough to ask ourselves: since we're all implicated in the system of inequality and injustice in the land of the pure, how do we look at ourselves in the mirror? Is it only superficiality and amnesia that prevents us facing reality?].

What also struck you was the utter falseness of the sentiments, the accounting mentality: the sound of an oar for all the years of sorrow. Really? All? And whose sorrow..the poet's?

~~

Why did Plato banish the poets (Iris Murdoch is fascinating on this) and why is there hostility to them in the Qur'an?

'The 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'? I guess everyone thinks on those lines, in a way. Physicists think they study the 'queen of sciences'; economists think the world would be made right if everyone listened to them; the religious believe that everything would be solved if people got back on to the path, their path. People in the humanities look down on the sciences and think that they're the only ones who can really understand the deeper currents of 'the human spirit', be in tune with their finer sensibilities; and the sciences look down on the humanities: what is all this vague and fluffy stuff? Pragmatic people will tell you what's really going on and how to steer clear of all that wishy washy idealism. Get Real! (and make a buck in the process).

In short, everyone is a trader, trying to sell their wares, attempting to convince the punter that they, and they alone, have the goods.

Monday, May 25, 2015

The Last Act

But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic [people] is inevitable. But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that binds us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost.

--G. Bowley.

Ironically, it is farming and the mentality associated with it that has, in part, been one of the main reasons for the decline of first peoples. And so now we look to the last Man, caught in the final act, waiting to slip off the stage, to remember the words he's forgotten.

~

In the early morning, as you walk across the field, you see a young student, with a folded cardboard box under one arm, blowing kisses to a woman in the girls' hostel and waving triumphantly. The final gestures before each goes their own way in life?

At the shop a sad and pathetic looking man asks the shopkeeper: "Have you seen my keys?". Then, later: "I know you've got them, please give them back"..and as he tilts his head to one side, with a smile that speaks of hundreds of years of being downtrodden: "I know my failings, I admit to them, but please give me my keys back". You sense the shopkeeper has heard all of this act before and doesn't even bother looking at him. Instead he just coldly tells him to check if he hasn't left them in his motorbike.

At the bank and it's a wonder to witness the order there, the idea that there are rules, procedures, some semblance of civility ("would you like some tea?" is what they routinely ask, knowing there's only a one in ten chance you'll accept). But in a disintegrating world, full of chaos and bigotry, this small square room affords a degree of calmness, an oasis of exchanges that are utterly predictable and reassuring.

Sort out your finances and try and avoid the taxman who is breathing down your neck. It's no use asking why they don't go after the corrupt-how naive you can be! Just pay someone off and get it sorted. That, I'm afraid, is the solution to everything here (it's also the problem).

~~

The sun is into its full stride now, pounding us each day: 43, 44, 43...it goes on, without missing a beat. Its relentless presence is getting to me. I, for one, will not be sad to see it decline and will rejoice when winter comes along banishing it to a shadow of itself, like a failed king.

~~

When I was briefly on facebook some woman, who taught philosophy somewhere, wrote to me: "I've fallen for you, let's have a fling". Ha! The casualness of it all! My only response was (a la Groucho): I don't trust anyone who after three days can have those sentiments!

I think of the criticism I've received over the years here on the black sun. Some of it quite personal: a comprador of the west or simply anti-west; too naive or too quiet. Californian anon saying I hadn't really grown up (probably true, that). But the best-and most damning and certainly the most accurate came from anton:

'oh b i find this a bit cheap of you. it looks to me now like you didn't make a real effort of understanding c's writing. you even admitted it in the comments. now it seems to me like you only participated in the discussion to confirm your own prejudices of some thinker you haven't even read properly, maybe so as - yes and now i say it, retire from life to your own secluded position which you arbitrarily decorate with arendt or anti-fanaticism chatter and never ever let your position challenge by "the unknown" or conceptions of what "human" is, in the first place. where was the meeting half way? i thought i tried. did you try?
you don't have to like or agree with c, fine by me, but at least pretend some lesser degrees of superficiality. something new b, i know you can do it. really.'

Sunday, May 24, 2015

The Last Word

Every room is full of heat and light by 8 o'clock; the heat is packed in tightly, like boxes placed on top of one another, with the slightest variations in temperature as you move up them, like a worn-out scale; outside, the heat and light surrounds you and the shade is whittled down to a bare minimum. You say 'outside' but in truth the distinction becomes less relevant at this level. Glass or gauze netting are one in their functional relation to the sun. Two crows stand at a distance from one another on a top ledge, slightly out of breath, not looking at eachother. The distance makes you wonder if they're married.

On the ground, the bark of trees has peeled off and lies there like large pencil shavings, thin, curled and flaking. The grass is growing at an alarming rate now that it's untended. You see weeds and other hardy characters re-emerging. In other places the grass has browned or turned to a straw-like stubble..soon to be dust.

One room only retains the briefest, faintest glimpse of early morning (as if the movement of the sun's light in the apartment aims to eradicate distinctions). Here there is still a whisper of a breeze, still the sound of birds chirping outside-and there is an outside, an "up" and a "down". The books, in the meantime, continue to collect dust, yawn and slip back into their drowsy slumber. Every eye but mine is asleep.

~~

The night before you walked into the swanky bookstore where they were unpacking books from lovely cardboard boxes; the sense of moving in, making arrangements, making sense of the world, despite all the haphazardness without (and a fair bit 'within'). Some jazz playing in the background (Ella); the owner, from ol' blighty, working there herself, hair pinned up, in slacks. You let a word out, let your voice return to a former inclination, as if to say: recognition rests on the simple fact of this specific tone of your voice or in the way a letter is displaced, forgotten. Reason not the need.

[You picked up Berger's latest book and from Readings, earlier, some P. Fitzgerald and Rilke (transl. Stephen Mitchell (though you like the Cohen one better))]

Once, while lecturing to some senior students at Birkbeck, two middle-aged women, identically dressed, spoke to you in the break. Don't think they were interested in the subject at all-and who could blame them! But they did ask: are you from Wales?

Well, how on earth did they know? Because the way you rolled out a word...

Where are you from, originally, you thought to yourself, echoing Carol Ann Duffy's question. Once you would say bus like a Geordie but that sound/time now lies buried deep somewhere. Too many stray thoughts ends up being reflected in your posture, your quizzical, bemused face...

Outside a man walks past you in a day-dream (there are many such people in this city, people wandering aimlessly). In his hand are two small bottles (of scented oil). He clinks them against eachother as he walks, looking for customers. In the old days people would be recognized by such signs. Still are, to an extent. At Bhatta Chowk a number of dejected workers sit at the roadside holding up paint cans or a plank of wood to indicate their profession (reminds you of a scene from Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd). People pass by and will hire them or move on. day-labourers like this are usually paid 400 Rs a day. If you go to a posh part of the town you can pay that much for a coffee.

~~

It is not right to speak ill of the dead so you won't say anything about Nash and the so-called 'beautiful mind'.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

your face, for the world to see

'A recent investigation by the Financial Times found that more than a hundred billions' pounds worth of real estate in England and Wales is owned by offshore companies. London properties account for two-thirds of that. Charles Moore [wanker], a former editor of the Telegraph, says that London's property market has become a form of "legalized international money laundering."'

--from The New Yorker.

Ah, the joys of deregulated markets and the old boys' network. You have to now wonder if the oil market has also been cornered? The report can be found here

And this caught your eye:

'Pop culture has disengaged our brains and arrested our development. Our cinemas are dominated by CGI spectacle, Pixar cartoon cutesyness and boring blockbuster sequels. Our restaurants are all artisan burgers, pop-up hotdogs and faux-ironic fried chicken. Our wardrobes overflow with hoodies, onesies, logo Ts and other outsized toddler-wear. Our Facebook feeds are all “yay!” this, “nom!” that..[turning us into] overgrown kids, obsessed with comic books, computer games, fast food and lazy nostalgia. The daydreams of our 1980s and 1990s childhoods have become a 21st-century reality.'

--M. Hogan, The Guardian.

Of course, you're very fond of hoodies yourself but not because of a feeble attempt to be hip-the usual middle age response to time flying before your eyes, slipping out of your hands; it's more about the comfort they afford and the idea that no-one can really see your face. If I had the chance I'd don a monk's habit, if not their habits.

Something childish, infantile about CGI?

'For, deeper still, in some primal part of us, there is always a vital role for the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. Imperfection is essential to art. In music, the vibrato we love involves not quite landing directly on the note; the rubato singers cultivate involves not quite keeping to the beat. What really moves us in art may be what really moves us in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”: the vital sign of a human hand, in all its broken and just-unsteady grace, manipulating its keys, or puppets, and our minds. Expressiveness is imperfection, and Harryhausen’s monsters and ghouls are expressively imperfect. “I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop-motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,” he once said, wisely, himself.'

--Adam Gopnik.

The penny has dropped:

'Our grandparents, less in hock to today’s ruling doctrines – that markets can be presumed to be infallible and egoism is always beneficial – were wiser about how to organise markets than today’s economists and regulators...

The entire framework, and the economic philosophy that supported it, has been found wanting.

Modern companies, of which banks are a sub-set, have been encouraged to define themselves not as organisations delivering economic and social good, but as profit-making machines for anonymous, tourist shareholders

And we need an acceptance that in market after market there is a co-dependence between state and business.'

--Will Hutton, The Guardian.

Friday, May 22, 2015

McUniversity and the ultra hip academy

A four-year undergraduate program designed to "empower the next generation of disruptive inventors and professional thought leaders across a multitude of global industries."

--from The New Yorker

I kid thee not!

Post-disciplinary research, multi-disciplinary research, cutting edge frontiers, hubs of excellence, fostering students' entrepreneurial potential ("the hidden me"); there's more: centres of excellence and innovation, developing analytical skills to face the challenges of the world economy, the IT revolution, the Orange Revolution, Prince's Purple Revolution; ethical leadership in a de-mythologized world; strategizinng and managing -"riding the tiger"- for dummies; training the trainers; Steve Jobs 101; creativity for nerds; gender studies funded by the al-Shaikh foundation; attentiveness and mindfulness for corporate success; how to tweet your emotional responses to your teachers (rate my professor); navigate-yes we must all navigate now- your way through the ten thousand books/comics/games/porn films on your computer; wire up, clue in, switch off, dumb down; a history of the book (an ITV documentary); Socrates vs Marx: an anthropological investigation; subjectivizing the subject to the post-colonial, ontological gaze of 'the other'; feminism for feminists; the non-existence of climate change (sponsored by BP, Shell). Learning to Read and the History of Thought with G. Walker; Middle East Peace Studies (co-taught by Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon).

Meanwhile, back in the jungle...

US-Aid has sponsored a two-day conference here on ethical leadership in the public sector. They've wheeled some people in from Hicksville and dressed it up a bit. But the real question: will US-Aid ever sponsor a conference on corporate greed and the failures of the private sector (including their links with the military establishment)? Don't hold your breath!

All this comes on the back of the massive Forex scandal and what has to be one of the biggest scams when it comes to higher education (and that's saying a lot!)..the Axact scam. the sheer inventiveness of this guy is impressive ("creativity," entrepreneurial skills?). What's even more interesting is the t.v. station, Bol, that he set up and that was about to be launched this summer against what the army think is the anti-army Geo channel.

Someone had told you about this a year ago, about how Bol was being backed by the army and that the private sector financiers who were behind it also made a lot of their money from porn and gambling sites. Say it again: states and market, states and...

But the sheer scale of this scam is not something you had any inkling of. In the land of the pure there's still a lot of "purification" that needs to take place!

all roads lead to Rome

There is no time for books, she thought to herself, but left a few open just in case it came to her, the word, the name she couldn't recall, that couldn't be found in anybody's heart. She had a love..for obsolete words, shadow words, things that had fallen or that were lost. Take a pencil, make a faint scratch, or leave the blank page as it is. A broken line from Sappho...

[

...]

Fall

[[..

[

for..

]

Lie back, and think of England.

She floated in and out of sleep, dreaming she was a fish at the bottom of the deep sea: Trop d'ocean, trop de ciel; her spine, a delicate and ancient bridge. Bridges know the meaning of distances, she reflected.

"I attach great importance to words, to the word that is spoken," she said, perhaps because they were always disappearing or always lost.

She looked up at the shelf, from the sea bed: you can never really own a book, she thought. Held, briefly, yes, but then closed; then on the other side of her eyes. I'l s'agit de pencher le coeur...her hand, too, was a kind of bridge. She wandered about inside herself, inside her heart.

"Tell me another story," she demanded, "one that never ends, that keeps you here, even though you're not here."

But there is no story.

"Then tell it to me".

But I don't remember it, not at all.

She rose and put the books back in their place, covered herself and put kajol on to mark the death of the word. Silently she repeated to herself:

Ammel: the first light of morning, that covers everything, that makes the ice glitter and sparkle and the landscape new.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Less than one

'This land is ours, all of it is ours.'

Academics and other oddballs cannot talk about (or with) other human beings; instead it is 'the other' or 'the subject'-the need for distance, cold objectivity a way of avoiding the profound and necessary human capacity to imagine specific people, with specific histories; no, not just that: to see them right in front of you and to see them in the right light (which requires seeing oneself in the right light), and not to talk about the wilderness and you the first Man; to not imagine them as 'dots and dreams' in your scheme. To speak for, with, to another person is decidedly not an attempt to assert or posit a fundamental sameness that exists at an abstract level (human reasoning, free will, or children of God) which then forms the basis of human rights. Reasoning, sound thought, is always a conversation with other people. To speak in time, just in time (think of Aung San Kyi's silence).

Is there a false universality and a true one? Well, markets and economic theory certainly rest on a false notion of human beings and an ahistorical approach to reality.

Human beings, warts and all, and hey, you know what, not too unlike us as well, but different too.

Of course, it's easier to slide into fascism, tribal mentalities, the animal-like comfort of warmth bred from familiarity (a great line in Becket).

And Levinas, always harping on about 'the other', radical alterity, infinite responsibility..what does he have to say when it comes to, you know, actual human beings? Shatila? Let's not go there.

Same with Berlin-whose writings you deeply admire. Not quite got the idea of pluralism fully worked out!

Ho hum.

~~

Black Sun