There are a number of reasons for this, many of which are personal and banal (e.g. I’ve been reading Aesthetic Theory again along with Robert Hullot-Kentor’s brilliant Things beyond Resemblance which I’ve only just discovered.)

However, over and above such trivial things, the reason I’ve been thinking of Adorno is because of the ‘Occupy Melbourne’ Movement and the terrible things that happened last Friday, when the current mayor of Melbourne gave the police license to not only brutally “remove” (there’s nothing as hard nor as cold as a euphemism, no?) the 100 or so people who had been bravely, joyously and proudly living, talking and thinking in common for the previous 6 days in the City Square, but also to herd, arbitrarily arrest, opportunistically punch and generally terrorise those protesters who later turned up to peacefully show their solidarity with the occupiers and their outrage at the latter’s treatment earlier in the day. (If you don’t know what I mean, please see this and this.…) Oh, and this too.

As the “rooftop collective” has said today, this violence was in many ways predictable, in that it is a a cliche of politics that those who try to expose or contest the structural violence that underlies “our way of life” (TM), almost invariably coax, by the simple act of constituting themselves as a people, that violence from its hiding place; becoming, through their actions, the first victims of this violence in all its naked glory and terror.

N.B. In speaking here of this provocation of violence, I do not, for a moment, mean to criticise the protesters.. On the contrary, I say this by way of saluting the courage of those who have risked and will continue to risk injury and arrest so that they (and others) can maintain the power to say ‘we’, those who are prepared to dedicate themselves to what Badiou calls one of the great (forgotten) projects of the 20th century: the attempt to find new forms of the ‘we’ that cut across all extant, visible, ‘counted’ lines of filiation or any (pre-conceived) notions of communal substance.

In saying this then, I am really doing little more than making the general (and unoriginal) statement that “Power” in the Arenditan or Spinozist sense — the power that comes from the gathering of people under conditions of equality and under the auspices of Reason — “provokes” violence, because it fills (i.e. occupies) the space which violence seeks to dominate. It is the Red Flag to Oppression’s Pharsalian bull. But, the power that comes from bringing people and ideas together is, to paraphrase St. Paul (and, in a way, Antonio Negri) -stronger- than the violence arrayed against it, even in its weakness. We have already seen this, in the Saturday following Friday’s horrors, when those who had been thrown over barricades, dragged as if they were to be drawn and quartered, rose up again to speak before a (much larger Assembly) with new vows to continue and to extend the domain of the struggle. (In a way very different from what Michel Houellebecq meant by the title of his first novel.)

Now, it might be objected that this is desperately naive. “It is all very well to shout about the’triumph of love’ and ‘people power’ slogans in the face of batons and capsicum spray, but don’t batons crush flowers, even when we’ve called for a thousand of them to bloom?” In a word, no. Or, rather, only if you are far too literal in your grasp of metaphors.

Putting it differently, if it’s true that it’s difficult to contend (as another friend of mine put it at Saturday’s rally) with the forces of the State (as he put it “the Masters of Territory”) when it comes to occupying a -particular- territory, this doesn’t mean that Territorial Masters (who would count themselves “democrats” while showing themselves willing to, quite literally, turn the dogs loose on the demos) will win just because they are so callously willing to strike at the fragile bodies (literal and figurative) that are coming together to oppose present injustice in the name of a different future than the one that seems laid out for us. Instead, I have hopes that the movement’s power (i.e. the power of the -global- movement, beyond its merely local avatars) will exceed it’s own (or anyone’s) capacity to occupy, or ‘hold’ a particular territory. As my friend said, and as we have seen in Oakland, in Sydney and elsewhere, the movement — through no lack of determination — will have trouble holding a space once the police are unleashed and given impunity to prevent their doing so. But the real political power of the movement is not limited to the capacity to conquer/liberate territory, even if the initial gesture of occupying space is crucial for making visible the opposition which the powers that be would render invisible.

On this note, I am quite sure that, as I said a year ago, we are on the cusp of a new epoch in progressive politics and that new and stronger movements will rise from the ashes of today’s struggles. What I think cannot be denied is that the sad hegemony of neo-liberalism is starting to fray.

This is not, of course, to say that victory is on the horizon: would that that were so. But I do think that the movements that are rising at the moment in Greece, in Spain, in Britain, in Chile and in the United States, will, at the very least, provide experiences from which all kinds of people (and perhaps an entire generation) will learn ways of continuing to struggle in the face of oppression, ways of adapting without compromising, of learning from the political -experiences- which have always been (as Rousseau said) the conditio sine qua non of political will.

Now, despite this praise, I’m not for a a moment suggesting that the “Occupy” Movement (globally and let alone in Australia) is perfect. It isn’t (and not only for small reasons like my — perhaps idiosyncratic — dislike of consensus-based decision making). There are problems, most of which — as Zizek has recently pointed out — are to do with the ‘morning after’ question, the vision of not just what to do in order to fight the iniquities of the present, but a vision of what kind of state, what kind of order we want to succeed the present one. At this level, I also agree – being constitutionally skeptical about anarchism – that we need a new vision of the State or of a just order that will not be found (or even thought about) if we put all our hopes on to the spontaneous, the carnivalesque, the explosion of ‘popular energy’ that comes when people first find out that they are powerful in being together. Now, note, I’m not trying to deride such experiences: it is a wonderful and important thing to find ways of overcoming our isolation, our anomie, our sense of being cut off from others: we are all of us (those of my generations -subjectivised- by the neo-liberal form of capitalism, and we can and must learn to become a different kind of creature.) I’m just saying that I can’t see that either the task of building a more just society (nor even the look of that society) will always be compatible with the affects or the activities of the carnival, anymore than it can (or even needs) to maintain constant exuberance, spontaneity and feelings of oneness. Doubtless, this is uncool of me, but I even see room for one or two bureaucrats in the New World.

But having said all this, and despite and even because of the brutal repression we’ve seen in the last few weeks, I do think that something is changing and that we live, in the best sense, in interesting times. It’s not, of course, that I see a fast train to utopia in the various ‘occupy movements’, but I do see the signs of a thaw, a sign that change is coming, a sign that certain aspects of the present system are so openly insane and open unjust that even the hysterical lies of the right-wing media won’t be able to hide from their most convinced consumers. It’s as if these movements are lighthouses with faulty beacons; fragile, but even their dim light can still remind storm-battered ships that they were -meant- to sail rather than to stay fearfully in a harbour decked out for someone else’s private enjoyment. It’s something that, against the bankrupt triumphalism of the last three decades of neo-liberalism, reminds us that a politics geared towards nothing but the avoidance of a particular kind of disaster (totalitarianism) is not enough, that politics needs positive goals, actual hopes, a positive conception of the good, a glimpse of the City on the Hill that we sometimes catch while contemplating a work of art, an aspect of nature or in the eyes of another.

But, anyway, you ask, what does any of this have to do with Theodore ‘Teddie’ Adorno.

The connection is with another violence, a second violence that I who was not (despite having traveled to the Occupation several times in the previous week) present for Friday’s terrible events, witnessed only in the aftermath of these events. It was a violence which, as my friend Ben pointed out to me in a letter, is in some ways as disturbing as the violence that was so visible on the streets of Melbourne on Friday. I’m speaking here of the reactions, on Twitter and elsewhere, of members of the Australian public, to what happened on Friday, not just the predictable front-page story and editorial in a certain (squalid Murdoch tabloid): but the hundreds and hundreds of people whose reactions to ‘protesters were beaten and dragged’ stories was ‘God bless the Police for doing their job/great to see these hippies beaten/they’re not the 99%, they’re the 1% — they’re disrupting my day’.

Faced with this (in ever more vituperative forms) I couldn’t help thinking of the fundamental Adornian motif of ‘regression’: i.e. of the idea that because all thought, all ‘culture’, all subjectivity comes, ultimately, from an attempt to conquer an irrational and threatening nature (both inside and outside us) the process of conquest gives rise to two kinds of remnants, whose unreconciled status emits a banshee-like howl throughout psyche and society. The first is strictly atavistic and manifests itself in fear-laden violence against others, in resentment, hate, the desire to make others ‘pay’ for the suffering that we at a deep level of corporeal memory know we’ve undergone on the road to making ourselves into the kind of people who can ‘get on with and get over things’, who can accommodate and adapt ourselves to the demands of ‘reality’, who can ‘let go and have a good time, can settle down to working, being normal, having fun, working on ourselves’, putting aside our memory of the cries that we might have omitted during the process by which we were tempered into something ever colder and harder. Who could not fail to see this ‘return of the repressed’ in all those noble, humanitarian cries praising ‘the police and the mayor’, in the joyful exclamations that greeted the news of people being dragged and punched and scared so that they shook? Who could fail to read — in the predictable and lame cries of ‘Get a job!’ — a sentiment like: “I am made to suffer and to renounce enjoyment, ergo, so should everyone else!” This unmistakable ressentiment is even more obvious, given the fact that – as has been pointed out – the idea of the jobless protester is, of course, a vacuous and false stereotype that the critics of the occupiers hardly examined before they embraced it. Indeed, what is truly remarkable about the obvious fear, insecurity and resentment behind so many of the “anti-occupy” sentiments is how naked they are about their desire to have violence done to others who are thought, by their actions and retention of ideals, to have ‘escaped’ the violence that the rest of us have learnt to bear as part of the normal course of things. This nakedness of aggression then finds its exact parallel in the glib posturings of the mayor (and the right-wing news) which, disdaining to deny either the violence or their own endorsement of it, embrace it as the result of a good days work: “We did this.”, they say, avowedly proud, “We’ll do it again.” If this is horrifying, it is also, I can’t help thinking, the sign of a collapsing hegemony: a sign that those like Robert Doyle are, perhaps even at a conscious level, aware of the vacuity of their ideological position, of the fact that they stand for nothing, and thus that they respond to a challenge — even a whiff of real democracy — with nothing but force and that lamest of all appeals: ‘This is the way things are! This is the way things work!” But, it can’t be too long before those who’ve perversely turned their anger randomly towards those protesting the suffering caused by an economic system that favours the 1% over the 99 realise that the causes of their own suffering (at work and in the broken remnants of what was once a society) lie more with those who are ready to take a fist to the face of real democracy than those who call for it in the streets. Put differently: if the naked violence we’ve seen is frightening, I can’t help thinking that it is also frightened….

P.S. Another time, I might talk about the second kind of ‘remainder’ (the ‘memory of nature’) that Adorno talks about and how this, potentially militates against the tendency for ‘regression’ that I have — very superficially — outlined here.

But for the moment, I should just note that though Adorno has much more to say on this, he’s still (unfairly) unlikely to be read in all kinds of progressive circles because his reputation as an elitist mandarin (a Jazz hater no less!) — blinds people to his critical merits.

On this point then, I leave you with the following quote from the very talented Hullot-Kentnor:

“But it was a complete misunderstanding to suppose that Adorno would cast his lot in with a movement to spread culture. He carried no torch for culture, and least of all for musical culture. When he arrived in the United States what was fresh to his mind was the thought of a Bildngsbuergertum — the culture-prizing bourgeoisie — then to be found in the streets of the “homeland of culture” carrying real torches. This capitulation of German culture had not been an utter surprise to him. On the contrary, German culture had failed to ward off the worst, just because, as Adorno once wrote, it had long been an ally of the worst. Adorno had seen it coming in the deep perspectives of the opposition drawn by all radical art, since romanticism, to bogus culture. The music with which Adorno was most allied, the idiom of free atonality in which he composed, had inherited that jagged radical tradition. The concerts of the Second Viennese School had their own legitimacy confirmed, inadvertently, in the outrage, catcalls and whistlings brought down on them by audiences sworn to higher things…

(Hullot-Kentor – Things Beyond Resemblance, p. 107)…

Love &c.,

-Mal

*Update 31/10: Some links: 1) Zizek in the Guardian discussing the Occupy Movement. Particularly clear-sighted in its rejection of the false-choice between what he’s criticised elsewhere as the tactic of ‘bombarding the system with impossible demands’ (a willing or unwilling ‘hysterical’/'beautiful soul’ position) AND b) ‘being realistic’ and having ‘concrete’ (i.e. innocuous) demands. 2) Ont his last note, c.f. this from Dr Tad of “Left Flank”: worth it for the title alone.

I can’t (and don’t want) to say any more than this. I already wrote a hopelessly inadequate eulogy, that I, for a number of reasons, can’t actually remember delivering. So, for now, facts separated by parataxis will have to suffice.

But, why then write anything in this space? Not to entertain my readership, of course. I’ve just felt, for a long timethat I couldn’t go back to writing anything for the blog, without first prefacing it with some at least token announcement of this. I’m not sure why: I have after all, written other things over the last few months in more formal contexts; and I’ve never been the kind of personal, confessional or charismatic writer whose readers want to hear more about them and their lives.

In any case, I am not telling you this because I’m planning to be morbid, nor to suggest, that I’m planning to write a series of endlessly sad, or bitter or self-pitying things in weeks (and months to come). On the contrary, I can assure you that I have built up a back catalogue of more or less silly things to share with you.

It’s just that I felt the need to tell you at least the bare outlines of this, not so that I can turn my little blog into a (poorly selected) forum for grief, or for talking about things that belong to the arcana of families and the dark spots of the soul, but so that I can, precisely, move on to talking about other things without the sense that what makes me do so is glibness, forgetfulness or, worst of all, the weird and slightly obscene shame that many people feel in the face of their own pain.

Instead, I hope, that in continuing, precisely, to…not talk about emotional undercurrents or overtones I’m in some vague way keeping faith, more with at least some of my best my memories of my Dad who was a quiet, unambitious, unpretentious man, who loved small comforts and distracting, funny things. It’s a description, I know, that fits almost any of us, all those unglamorous human beings the world over whose life and death (like all of ours) will pass by unnoticed by the world save for small, bright places in the consciousness of those who knew them. But, of course, for every person, as for reality itself, there is an irreducible excess of parts over elements. And one of those parts in my Dad to which I want to stay most loyal is the sense of wonder that stayed with him for as long as his mind was intact: a sense that is, of course, as Plato insisted, inherent to humanity, but which a sentimental, but not false, convention makes the special province of children, artists and even philosophers — whatever they might be.

Life passes
The way the traffic does –
For a child in the back of her parents car,
For a bored, stoned,
Long-boned
Teen Magician,
Looking down at the highway from an
Suburban overpass;
Stretching his dreams beyond fandom and towards flight.
In the end,
Everything disappears
Like clock-time and
Like Sunday afternoon;
Like small victories
And soccer-balls: perfectly translated
From one graceful, straining leg to another; beautifully arranged
(Like the toy soldiers in an Aspergic’s garage)
In the name of a purpose, which is also an end

Where I come from we call this sort of thing a:
(Shout it out with gusto and a thick Yorkshire accent, children –)
Goooooo –oooooooooooooooo-oooooooo- aaaaaaal
…bowl, soul,
“Oh, indeed: very droll,
Oscar: so very like you too…
Epigrammatic, what?”
Watch it roll
Merrily along, now,
Down and further down
Around and around
(Its feet unbound)
To where the dream takes you:
Breaks you,
Makes you, unwittingly, its catcher
In-the-rye
Smiles on lovers:
(Nothing dolorous about a willing slave)
Last, loyal daughter
Of the Old King.
Devoted and diminished you are destined to become
Its accountant and its taxidermist
Martyr and stalker,
The fair-weather Facebook friend
Of all that you won’t quite remember.

Today, with our super-sized doses of Oneirine
We are (now and always) both the Giant and the Jellyfish,
Paragon and Prisoner:
Our nights are the kindling of the world:
Our days are the embers of its forgotten flags.
Our hopes the encouraging exhalations, made asthmatic, now, by time and by defeat.

II

Watch, now, as the crowd gasps itself back into life,
In stadiums and living rooms:
Everyone stops
And then,
Breathless, we start to shout
And as we do so,
We
Snap.freeze.time.

In this slow, new, rock-like, mud-textured dimension
The ball surges, somehow,
Improbably, into the net, which:
Infinite as an uncharted ocean –
Becomes that by which we baptise
All those tenuous connections between words and things,
By which we summarily engender
The precarious tonality of a world.

Things word and words thing.
They do so by way of a lure which is also
Us,
We are a mesh,
A means, a dream of words, a mean wish,
A maimed witch with which
We switch lives and raid hives,
Without anger and without gratitude:
We’re striving always to captivate the sad-eyed animal beyond our words,
And in our slaughterhouses:
Its freedom (panther, or mantis, bird or dog, owl or crow)
Blinds us:
You can look through the mirror, but still can’t meet its gaze:
Night-black
Sky-blooming,
Thunder-booming:
If you look carefully,
You’ll see it scurry from the tomb
Escape through the mouse-hole
To this Nocturnal, nebulous neverland
It is the smooth magic of Dummheit:

Silence and darkness, you told me,
Tremble
At the edges of our words,

I think I caught them doing this once,
Shaking through a whole Christmas morning
Gesticulating “wildly” around fantasies
That might have been mine if they were anyone’s.
But hope
Infuses every utterance:
Profound, of course:
But still dumb.

And life knows all of this:
It knows it all without thinking:
It eludes everything
While alluding, obnoxiously, to everything else:
It cuts and it perforates, it breeds and it seethes
Even and especially when it seems to miss the mark:
The Real expands beneath our clumsy, groping touch:
And the whole teeming, streaming, not-quite-seeming universe
Arises out of
This
From this and for this,

We are the leftover echo
Of a single flirtatious, “come-hither” glance into the unborn future,
A shy salutation from the Many to the One
And back again
(Hello!),
Infused with the unknowable and the ‘not’,
With the traces of an encomium for someone not present:
Someone who,
Like all of us
Was born
Lost
But found drowned,
Appointed to occupy
The fringes of memory,
But to dream perpetually of the abandoned centre,
Where we still fancy ourselves sentinels
And shamans:
Old, long vanished travellers who will be welcomed home:
By our families and our dogs.

We are destined to be tortured
By doubt, at least,
And by the remorse
Which afflicts
Every Creator I’ve ever known
Except you
To spend our nights on the merry-go-round,
And in the night-clubs.L
Drunk with what might-have-been and what was:
Nourished on nothingness and on syllables made radiant
By time and by the
After-glow of reverence long ago disavowed.

But surely, you protest, when it comes to this:
Self-citation on such a scale
Takes stones:
Breaks bones,
Shakes thrones,
Makes mewling midnight moans
That turn you on
Like the central heating systems in
Respectable Houses.
(Safe is the new sexy, or so I’m told)

But even here you can see life
Triumph
In the midst of its own
Perpetual
Self-defeat.

How else does anything manage to exist, after all
Given that to do so, so unmistakably defies
The house-style of every reputable journal on your top 10 list?
“I don’t know exactly, but it strikes me as a task for the censor
Or the chief of police:
For Miss Marple and for Hercule Poirot
Together at last in some Super-hero Super-group
With Sherlock Holmes and…I don’t know..
A charmingly idiosyncratic selection of X-Men
In skintight jumpsuits
“I suppose, if we had to:
We could offer him a teaching position of some sort
But he’s scarcely suitable for research.”

“Caspar David Friedrich!”
She exclaimed obscenely,
“I want this. I want all of those sultry, shiny things,
At once, and without delay.”
I know, I see, I was there when the first fires started to fall.
When the first fits were raised to the newly formed heavens,
At the exact moment
Before they were forcibly opened (palms up)
To flail futilely at the first flies.
All I want is for you to see me as I’ve always seen you.
Bereft of nothing, and
Bathed in the infinite grace of
Those who can reach out to another person’s shoulder,
Without fear or self-doubt:
Impossible, of course
Like everything towards which our hearts strain,
Like those space-ports of the soul
You run out of fuel before you get there.

In the end, it’s like any of those things that we make,
Tentative and bemused
From each other’s spare soul-parts,
Dizzy-dream things all,
Remnants of the animals whose
Throats you slit for the altar:
Reality-shrouded,
Now harsh, bright, overly speculative, fragile things:
Drawn carefully from the well of language,
The water still overflows the edges.
They have transmogrified
Become, over aeons, precious stones,
Carefully removed
From the bellies of our architects:
A blind man’s bluff (the double-binds are rough)
It’s the great, glass-bead game
Which declares music the food of love
And plays on:

When you were younger, you promised that
You’d remember.
You didn’t, of course,
For we are destined to forget.
But, you, Tiresias,
Who have been all things:
Foretold all things,
Been shown all things:
But who (like the rest of us) have not love
And are, therefore, nothing:
You, old friend, reproach me, now, with winter coming?
The stores empty, and the fields fallow
The raiders buckling on their armour?
The light fading.
We’re like an old
Married couple, now, aren’t we, old friend?
Finishing each others sentences and scouring
Each other for vulnerabilities,
Incisions made from dim affection and by visible futility.

Do you think this means we could resolve our
Arguments
Four moves in advance like
Master-chess players?
Become spiteful and smug
With the partial clairvoyance of supreme logic
And servile cunning.
We’re lovers in a very, very abstract and, er, slightly made-up sense of the term:
Friends, technically, but without benefits
But between us there is also,
Hauntingly
Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters:
Friends, yes.
In the end we will find ourselves looking into the same stained mirror:
We’ll die clinging to the same crumbling mast.

III
Eyeless, I am without pity.
Pitiless, I see clearly before the end.
You brought her back to me, cruel and capricious gods:
Just when you’d thought I’d lost everything:
Your small mercies are, of course, the hardest of all to bear:
I never imagined it would be like this:
Her, suddenly being-there, here
Beside me at the last:
Steady hands to guide my faltering, swollen-footed step,
I’d already died twice, when she found me.
And I know the crueller fate you had laid out for her :
She led me (sweet thing) to the place where I could wish/wash/wrench away
The crime of my existence:
And though my iniquities threatened to blot out the sun.
They made me holy then, fools and worse than fools:
Called me Pater, and Tryannos,
More wonderful and terrible than the totality,
Or its gaping hole:
It ends now:
Which is to say that I do:
The old, blind, King, radiant and
Defiant to the last,
Stalking in holy destitution
The sacred grove
Like a tiger who knows the lock on his cage
Will break before another sun has set.

In this place of restitution, I will say the last words,
Without apology or regret.
I will fiercely face the destitution of my being:
With these, my last words,
The family curse which moves me
And us all:
Becomes immortal.

O, my daughter:
We dream of waking every day, and when we wake from these dreams:
There is an effulgence even in the emptiness:
The rocks reverberate with our song.

The fact that someone of my congenital uncoolness managed to be present at something like this is due to a combination of the underlying contingency of the universe plus a bit of old fashioned divine intervention. Specifically, I attribute it to 1) cosmic rays and 2) the graces of the shiny new gods of social media to whom, I’ve been known, of late, to sacrifice more than the requisite number of goats.

The story — and I can tell that you’re interested by the way you’ve opened another window and are now watching “Onion” videos in the background – goes like this:

At about 10.30 on the night, I glanced lazily at my Twitter feed for no real reason, (does anyone ever go on twitter with clear intentions?) and saw that a younger, more stylish, and very musically-savvy acquaintance of mine, was talking about how she was standing in a crowded sweat-pit of a pub in Brunswick anticipating….something. Given the “I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-an-actual-sauna!” levels of humidity in Melbourne over the past few days, and the fact that I retain at least a vague awareness of humanity’s inveterate fondness for the products of fermentation, I didn’t deem this sufficiently shocking to interrupt my sedulous practicing for the World Procrastination Finals (which I’m told are coming up Some-Time-in-the-so-called-“Future”-that-seems-a-long-way-off).

But then, my friend mentioned that she was somehow in the presence of Amanda Palmer. I carried on blithely doing the equivalent of typing google into google. An ice age or two went by while my synapses fired, all the time slow-clapped by the sarcastic part of my super-ego. Then I froze. What? I quickly tweeted a demand for an explanation using entirely arbitrary punctuation, and received for my request, an instant photo of AFP taken with an i-phone from down the road.

15 minutes later, I was inside the Brunswick hotel, sweating like I was being interrogated in a steam-bath by the STASI, and generally bringing to the room some much needed nerdy-chic by a) being my usual unprepossessing self and b) awkwardly carrying an umbrella, stuffed into a jacket so that I could add robotically stiff arms to my ineluctably unshakable booty.

But within 5 minutes, I was too exultant to be self-conscious; too carried away by the good humour of the crowd and the sense of being a witness to something miraculous: the kind of thing that would have made a Greek sculptor (say Phidias) erect a monument and then say some very Greek things on it, doubtless involving the flavouring particle ‘ge’.

The gig, as it turns out, was a fund-raiser for “The Jane Austen Argument.”

I’d seen these guys play support for AFP last year at the Forum, at a staggering, exuberant, scarily energetic firework of a show, that left me incapable of using consonants for several hours and grinning at the moon and the stars, like a super-villain who’s just realised that all her evil plans to CONQUER THE WORLD have borne fruit. And that she’s won the lottery.

Now, the curious thing is that I did retain a dim memory from that night of having being touched by the J.A.A.’s wistful, clever, beautiful, songs . But for some reason, it was only on Tuesday night, at the first notes sung by Tom Dickins in his haunting, surprisingly powerful voice that I realised that I’d at once had the J.A.A.’s music tattooed across my soul, and at the same time completely forgotten them. This was not, let me assure you, because the Jane Austen Argument are in the least bit forgettable, but rather because the rest of that gig, (during which AFP played a ukulele from the rooftop, sang “Winter Coat” with Paul Kelly, got “Bad Seed”Mick Harvey on stage and somehow taught a Cabaret band whose name I’ve forgotten, but whose lead singer had a mellifluous baritone and a perpetually roguish smirk, to play “Leeds United” in 2 minutes and also sang a hilarious new song about Vegemite) was so earth-shattering that its beginning (and much of the rest of it) was pushed into the depths of my unconscious mind, awaiting a Madeline to dip in my tea, or a cracked footpath that would flood my mind again with what had been, at the time, too overwhelming for short-term memory.

Nonetheless, as soon as the J.A.A. started to sing I remembered. And I haven’t been able to shake the memory since. In particular, I can’t get the duo’s in some ways “signature” song: “Bad wine and lemon cake” (which is going to appear on Amanda Palmer’s new album) out of my head.

But, why write about this on ze blog?

After all there are now several things on the inter-web explaining what went on. (There was an auction, a blistering encore of “Girl Anachronism”, duets, ukuleles, the universe died in fire and rose from the ashes, y’know…)

But the main reason, is that it made me think about music and the sacred or rather music, as the sacred.

I’m using “sacred” in Durkehim’s sense where the term is always connected to that which binds people together (as in the popular, but disputed etymology of religion, re-ligare, to rebind) or gives them awareness of their connection to each other, as well as to that which, by dissolving all (social) bonds, has the potential to create new ones.

omewhere in Truth and Method, Gadamer gives the etymology of ‘theoria’ as coming from ‘theoros’, – herald. He then says that the Greeks didn’t really distinguish between ‘spectator’ and ‘actor’ (the latter two words have Latin rather than Greek roots, but you get the idea) or more accurately, that they didn’t really see the two in as strict an opposition as we do.

So, ‘theoroi” were sent from each of the Greek city states to the Olympic games, but as such, they weren’t just there to watch, but to participate in what was going on by bearing witness to it. In other words, the activity and its observation were inextricably caught up in each other, in the way that we feel that it is at a concert. The notion of being a witness (‘martyr’ in Greek) is connected to a thought that both the spectators and performers, are all, up to a point, equally caught up in something that happens between them, and that through this en tangling what takes place is a revelation of the common( ta koina) of everything that is shared between human beings (from language, to desire, to hope, to love), despite the fact that this ‘shared’ aspect of our existence is mostly obscured in a daily life obsessed with distinctions.

(As Heraclitus says, even though discourse (logos) is common, everyone acts as if it belongs to them alone.)

In our time, there’re not many things that bring about this revelation. I mean, certainly you could mention sport, religion and aspects of politics, but, these days, all three of these appear in forms in which their potentially universalistic, and utopian dimensions are in danger of being swallowed by elements of aggressive identity-assertion. (“Thank god, we belong to this group, and not to this other, whom we declare apostates and enemies!”).

Sure, music has its own problems. Popular music, is as everyone knows, a multi-billion dollar industry, which can sometimes look like an operation for trapping and channeling desire in the name of capturing the restlessness and perpetual dissatisfaction needed to drive a consumer economy.

But, at the same time, as Tuesday night reminded me: the experience of music, especially the shared experience also has the opposite potential: to reveal what is illusory in all our strivings, and pretensions, in all our assiduous cultivation of difference. It can reveal, in a sense, that (at the risk of sounding like Agamben) that we, in reality, and despite, our everyday sense of this, lack nothing, i.e.,that the difference between redemption and its absence is a minor change, a temporary lift of our collective mood, a sudden gust of air into the cave, that makes all the prisoners look up and feel the sun on their faces. This is not, of course to trivialise, real suffering: there’s war and horror and in the world. Instead, I just want to suggest that the perpetuation of these, and the perpetuation of a feeling of starvation in the midst of plenitude are related to each other.

One of the fundamental human needs is the need to congregate, not simply in the sense of hanging out with our friends, but in the sense of being with people who we don’t know, and might not even invite ’round to dinner, i.e. being with strangers in such a way that the bonds between all of us can be at once assumed and created by our coming together.

But there is a danger in this need, as there is in all needs, namely, that the more people feel isolated from others, the more they feel the lack of ‘community’ or fellowship, the more the intensity of their desire can be used as a basis for atavistic communal forms predicated on the exclusion or even hatred of others, the kind of forms that Benjamin calls ‘mythic’.

As the power of religion has waxed and waned over the last few hundred years, music is, arguably, the closest we have come to finding something worthy of congregating for. In its capacity to bridge rather than maintain the spaces between us, it offers an adumbration of human relations stripped of aggression, and suspicion. It’s the least mythic, and most hopeful, way we have found of feeling a sense of the sacred, that doesn’t require a kind of dissolution of the mind or a sacrifice of the individual to some monstrous Fuehrer figure, nor an orgy of hatred against an imaginary enemy.

And when we’re talking about someone like AFP, whose work is so generous, so interested in what other people are doing (from 17 year old pianists she’s met on the streets, to Melbourne ukulele players with whom she’s chatted during tram-rides), so progressive, without ever becoming didactic (she should be a feminist icon, as well as a gay and lesbian icon), or self-important, it’s easy to see that reactionary movements and commercial dross don’t have to have the monopoly on making people feel condemned to being members of hostile tribes.

To just return to the topic of her feminism – Palmer’s music, from the way she attacks the piano as if it were about to start yielding up diamonds, to the deep throaty roar of her singing that occasionally climbs to a soprano-height only to dive down into a husky Lotte Lenya-ish abyss in which you expect her to say something about “the next Viskey Bars” or join Tom Waits in a duet; to the playful, poignant, frequently ribald, but also perpetually witty lyrics exude an unmistakably female power that nonetheless never collapses into manufactured Spice girls/Sex in the City style, ‘nothing empowers a girl like a handbag’ vapidity.

Whereas the above-mentioned horrors identify women’s power with a consumer-imperative (a woman can be powerful if she’s a gorgeous model, mother, and pole-dancing CEO, who can afford to treat herself, through judicious use of a credit card (c.f. my review of Nina Power’s book on this blog) Palmer’s music exudes a joy in life and womanhood per se, without making any demands that anyone ‘do better’, or compete with each other in order to feel this joy. To use just one of a host of possible examples, her new single “map of Tasmania” is an ode to pubic hair in an age where younger and younger women are encouraged to feel that there couldn’t possibly be anything beautiful “down under” unless it’s been shaved, surgically tightened and maybe (to use a word, I only heard last year to my undying horror) ‘vajazzled’.

In addition, while AFP’s burlesque, Weimar Republik cabaret-style sexiness is much commented on (and indeed unmistakable), it’s a sensuality that’s very rare in pop, for having almost nothing to do with any studied attempt to please the masculine viewer: there’s no suggestion of the strip-tease/porn aesthetic of ‘this is what you like and thus I shall give it to you’. On the contrary, it’s a sexiness that comes from a kind of defiant will-to-self-expression, that is not confessional because of its Brecthian-self-awareness, playfulness, and from a constant suggestion — in her voice, and in her sassy, amazingly self-confident attitude, a wicked playfulness that seems as if it would go on in the absence of any audience — of a feminine desire, that is not only voracious and polymorphous, but autonomous and, in a way, auto-poietic (i.e. self-creating)

(When I read Anwyn Crawford’s typically evocative remarks on Lady Gaga last year – the latter of whom I confess to still not entirely understanding — I was definitely thinking of a certain dark-haired pianist who may or may not add the name Gaiman to her own.)

P.S. I got CARDED at the Brunswick Hotel, even ‘though I am incredibly old (30+) and have great swathes of white in my hair. Bastards. -

Feigning Fathomlessness,
We look past each other,
Away from each other,
Towards the Interior:–
Towards that place where the Wild Things aren’t.

Do you promise not to eat each other
If one of you dies first
In the snow?
I know I did, but then my promises
(Especially when I’m walking through
Permafrost,
Dreaming
My heavy, frostbite dreams)
Are like the ashes of a newspaper:
Easily scattered by the wind

The embers extinguish themselves in an
Esoteric sequence
One by one
Like the lights over Europe,
On the cusp of war,

Outwards now –
(Stories of the city, stories of the snow)
I watch her, watching you,

We pose for the camera before we’ve noticed its presence
We peer through glass
So translucent that it obscures everything
Your gaze
Turns
Towards those
Deep sea-ruins of
Experience –
Unsalvageable.

You’re cold now.
Each mile feels heavier
Than the last:
Don’t stop now, we’re almost there.
Don’t breathe, he’ll hear you — probably hit you.
Don’t say what you mean or you might offend them.
And, anyway, isn’t your special brand of not-offending-people
(Or at least the right-sort-of-people)
What you call (preposterously) “your politics?”
In the same way that you call your vague desire for visibility: “Love”?,
The hope that people will be forced to listen to you
“Art”, or “Life”, or something equally sanctimonious,
The casual psychopathy of which might
Rouse even a cluster bomb to outrage?

It’s here.
Under the ice and
Under the water.
This.
Place.
This.
Cave.
This is where we lost
Eurydice, isn’t it? –
And with her –
The meaning of all this music:
We were young, I think, in an obvious,
Gratuitous sort of way
 I still had training-wheels on my bicycle
And a tail like a salamander
And wonder
We mistook the concentration camp,
For the sun-kissed world.

We can still make the world weep, darling,
Or so I’ve heard,
But, today, so much
Speech is like bronze
Turned green
And implacable with time
And the unctuous
Callous belief we have
In fate,
Merit,
And immortality.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that:
I want you to go out with me
(In the seediest possible sense
Of each of those words.)
But then I also want
To see the great
Civilisation Under the Sea
Before I die,
I want to dream the dreams
Of those crystalline beings,
Whose cities are ordered by
Alien geometries
As unintelligible as ballet,
As brutal as the rules of attraction.

I want to ride
On the back of the Leviathan,
Break bread with the
Prophet and stroke his beard,
Touch his protruding
Ribs,
I want to release every prisoner
And every slave,
To speak up for Job, and explain why his friends are
Such Jerks,
And why everyone is wrong about everything
Except maybe
Ernst Bloch:
And me.

I want to see you leap between skyscrapers made of mirrors and
Eat marshmallows for every meal,
I want to steal a goblet from the dragon’s hoard,
Fill it with the waters of life,
And then raise it to the lips of the Dead,
I want to offer you and even that other guy,
A pension and a more-than-fair
(Justice is nothing if it’s not an excess)
Wage.
I want us to Go On Adventures with
Our Animal Companions,
And for all of the toys of your childhood,
To explode into life at the stroke of my pencil

I want you to remember,
Not so much your ”dreams”
(Jesus Christ, are we Americans?!)
But the ragged, forgotten, impossible preposterous
Gleefully anthropophagic
Glory of everything
Bright enough,
Brave enough,
To remain
(Pitilessly)
Indifferent
To you and me and everyone we know.

Adorno, thumbing idly through his copy of Lucretius’s Rerum Natura and as if dictating:

The goal of enlightenment is to emancipate ourselves from the need to make irrational sacrifices. The hope of thought and of art- their necessarily precarious, always half-sophistical justification for their existence – is that the encounter with truth, even the search for it, can be a blow struck against the sacrificial imperative, a defiance of that reality principle which starts by saying “let him who does not work, go without bread”, and ends in the so-called morality by which one assumes (as Nietzsche famously pointed out) that the lives of the blessed will be sweetened by their ability to hear (and, of course, to relish) the cries of the Damned.

The roots of reason, of thought and of creation are in suffering: which is not to say that the activities do not bring joy. Wonder is magnificent, but, like most magnificence, not supsect, but secondary. Our ancestors looked to the stars and were edified; they felt their hearts leap, but they also moved to think by being seeing the charred, unblinking corpses of their loved ones: they felt, as we still feel, the lash-marks on their souls as well as their backs: the great weight of longings become burdensome, even though their first appearance was as gravity-defying as a dream of flight.

Art and thought served the cult, and the cult served, in most interests, the powerful: the old families, the old ways, the sacred, order, sacrosanct and invioable. But this wasn’t (isn’t) the whole story. In every triangle scratched in the dirt, in every cave-painting of those animals whose freedom inspired awe, love, and imitation, in strange beings that we hunted for meat, but also played with, imitated, watched from a distance and painted on the ceiling of our caves, the question rang out: couldn’t it be otherwise? To think, as we’ve always known is always, to some extent, to defy. It is to hold the world up to the standard of the idea. It’s to measure the ways by which the wealth of the city is and “has always been” divided by the standards of the new science of geometry.

To this extent — and though I would never side with that sentimentality towards “youth” and “spirit”, which is too compromised by a very German, very Romantic atavism — to think is, still, in an essential way, to side with the child’s naive hopes of happiness over the sobriety that has been slowly extracted from the adult. To hold the world up to the light of the idea is an attempt to leap over the fences that present-day reality has ringed around the possible, while remembering that a glimpse of the Great Outdoors should not be mistaken for an -actual- exit from a Conquered World, any more than a dream of water in the desert is the same as the arrival in an oasis.

Horkheimer:

Enlightenment is…was….? the dream that knowledge could bring power and relieve the burden which has always been associated with humanity, exiled from Eden. At its best, it meant that truth could be the weapon with which we could knock the tyrant’s crown from his head. We fight, as Benjamin says, against the forces of Fate. Our weapons are courage and cunning, persistence, fraternity, and perhaps surprisingly — hope, faith, and love — a trivium which, irrespective of the fact that it is, today, stained with the heavy dust of platitude and the cloying banality of apologetics — is a conditio sine qua non of even the most humble endeavour. You cannot write a limerick, or build a fire, without at least something of these three virtues, let alone fight a battle against the wisdom of the world. But now that this long day’s journey has turned into night, the old hopes seem more poignant. Didn’t we think that once that once we allowed sunlight into the cave, the gods and monsters who bayed for blood would dissipate into the shadows? What do we say now, when we are told, that the celestial and luminous gods require the same kind of interminable appeasement as their cthonic predecessors?

Someone said — I think he was English — that the day the war began was the day that the lights went out all over Europe. If the dream has now turned into its opposite — if the repressed has returned in maelstrom of hate, in a gleeful monstrous orgy atavism, I wonder, is this the fault of the dream?

Adorno:

Perhaps. Maybe you and I should write a book about that, Max. But, they’ll misunderstand it and think we’re …Heideggerians or something worse. Returning to my normal, prophetic, non-dialogical voice: even if it carries the seeds of this new barbarism, we can’t indict reason or the hopes of equality for this entirely. To do so would be to imitate the atavists and the reactionaries: that strange alliance of scholars, businessman, and ‘ordinary decent folk’ who showed themselves too ready to rally to Hitler once he showed that he spoke for the wish of their hearts. Our Teutonic mandarins and good family men were too prepared, too obscenely quick to say — like Heidegger and Jung — that the present catastrophe is man’s punishment for his hubris, that we must crawl back to a belief in ‘enchantment’, which would actually amount to its opposite — to a belief in Fate, and power and the necessity of the altar, the rack, and the Secret Police. It is the perverse notion that the Order of Things will accept nothing short of total obedience if we are to avoid the sky raining fire down on us forever more. The worst thing imaginable according to these ‘pious Germans’ was to have allowed reason, to hold out a new kind of dream to the wretched of the earth. To this, our contemporary irrationalists reply that the Order of Things should be met with nothing but bowed knees and a dolorous gaze.

Against this, Bloch has eloquently described the way that even the the Old Testament contains more than simply a vengeful sky-god who demands obedience in the face of his unmatched power and caprice, but also the undermining of this very picture. The story of Job, for instance, says Bloch, is consistently and preposterously read by Christians as a story teaching the virtue of patience; that the untold suffering will be accounted for by later rewards. But against this banker’s theology, an endorsement of the platitudes of Job’s friends, there are also, Bloch points out, the seeds of a great heresy: when, asks Bloch, has the case against the notion of God’s justice ever been put with such ineluctable eloquence? Despite the bizarre and inexplicable response of God who thunders about his collection of magical beasts, the author of Job also portrays a God who (as Chesterton already pointed out) chastises Job’s friends — those who represent the worship of raw power throughout the ages and who thus sides with the claims of justice against the landlord’s suggestion that he was there first.

If we see, today, that the means of escaping sacrifice (i.e. Enlightenment) have been betrayed such that their once thundering accents are now used to legitimate sacrifice in the present, isn’t there also a way of restoring these means to their proper purpose in the name of liberation or of justice?
*

Sorry about that, just thinking a few things today. I’m not going to make the connections for you (if there are any!), but:

First, I’ve been following the stories of the British ‘winter of our discontents’ protests largely on Nina Power’s blog. As well as on, Dr. Power’s blog, you will find some accounts (with superb analyses free of charge): the first is from K-Punk, (actually I’ve referred to you to the main blog address, because it’s worth reading the last month or so of posts) the second by Dominic Fox, (For those of you who are interested in such things, you can also find here a brief statement of solidarity from the MSCP.) Dominic Fox’s piece also contains a link to one of the most appalling things I have ever seen in print, even by the standards of a writer for notoriously gutter-scraping English right-wing tabloids: in essence, it is a piece mocking a 20 year old philosophy student who was hospitalised after being severely beaten in the head by the police as essentially having got his just desserts (what was he doing, anyway, exercising a centuries-hallowed democratic right?!?) while surreally, but nonetheless monstrously choosing to mock the young man’s education and intellectual capacity based on the injudicious mixture of an apparent half-quote (way to get to know someone) and the writer’s own smug callousness.

But, despite (and obviously pace) the prurient and in many ways predictable horror of Duffy, the analyses of the protests by Fox, Fisher, Power and others as well as the reports and videos from of the protests have given me the sense of something inspiringly, wonderfully unpredictable: the first wakings of something of…Blakean proportions.

The reasons I say this?

First, the protesters seem extraordinarily articulate, well-organised, united, determined and best, of all, to share a sense of what they are fighting for and why.

Perhaps, you might say that my vision is rose-tinted by distance, fetishism for an ‘overseas’ Other and, of course, by hope, but it does also really seem to me that the English protesters are not only principled, daring, and courageous (in the face of water-cannons, ‘kettles’, beatings and the predictable mass-media reflexes of scorn and head-shaking) but also that this time the rhetoric, and the levels of organisation of the protesters suggest the possibility that the left (even in the Anglophone world!) might be about to leave behind what Felix Guattari once called the ‘years of winter’ that followed the defeat of the Movements of the 1960s. I’m not sure exactly how to justify my sense of this: doubtless someone might say cynically, (and thus wrongly) that everywhere in Europe and around the world there are protests against ‘austerity movements’ — just as there always will be in European countries when people are asked to make [sic] sacrifices in the name of those who are supposed to be above this demand.

But, there’s something more going on here: something like the old spark of univeralism: a rejection of the kind of fissaprous identity politics that always made it too easy for the New (post 60s) Right to perform its standard (gleefully disingenuous) tactic of portraying the left political activism of the same epoch as nothing but the self-assertion of a sub-culture. But I see a kind of explicit, and (better) persistent rejection of such claims in the action and in the speech of the protesters: a persistent message: that says: this is not about being ‘more radical than thou’, this is not about who participated and who didn’t in which rally, nor about which clique’s lifestyle is most meaningful or profound or best represents the world after the revolution. Instead, it’s about making, and not backing away, from the (obvious, yet, constantly obscured) statement (by action and by speech) that the rich and powerful (and not those who protest the sacrifices made in their name) are the strange sub-cultural excess detached from the ‘universal’, and that society, far from being equivalent to what best serves the interest of this group, is the ‘everyone’ that consists of all those who are (in Badiou’s terms) included in the present situation without belonging to it — i.e. not just, the majority, but all that which exists within the given political-national-existential situation, meaning all those who bear features, or attitudes, or who participate in processes, practices or ideas that go ‘uncounted’ by the current social order and its ways of measuring value.

Against the capitalist reality principle, therefore, the protesters are standing against that which has been the rule of the game for too long, against what cannot possibly continue to maintain its pretense of being ‘necessary’, ‘beneficial to’, or even ‘in the interests of’ “the people” by virtue of the mythical, risible, ‘trickle down effect’. Against these sophistries, I get a strong strong sense that the students and workers protesting the current British “austerity measures” are operating with philosophical principles of the kind that are essential to a revification of politics in this century. And politics, surely, whatever it may be, requires something more than a parliamentary moment that briefly interrupts the workings of a planetary casino whose major purpose seems increasingly to be to make sure that the people in the high-rollers room never run out of chips. Against this eviscerated politics (the political equivalent of a 1 minute community service announcement in a 24-7 television bloodsports marathon), we are seeing, at the moment, two new political trends. The first is the rise of atavistic right-wing populisms á la the “Tea Party”. The other, which I think we can see in the current UK protests and elsewhere, is what might be the beginning of a New Left Politics: a left that has cast off the strange defensiveness of the past few decades, the odd alliance with relativism and particularism, athe “I can’t believe it’s not neo-liberalism” fetish for difference and that will once again trumpet liberty, equality and fraternity. It is becoming clearer and clearer that these and even more modest principles of contemporary society are betrayed on a daily basis: that the apparent ‘end of history’ — the seemingly total triumph of capitalism in the 1990s — has after a brief honeymoon — only exacerbated the kind of systemic injustice that will never be registered (let alone rectified) by the great bureaucratic alibi of the ethics committee.

Love,

Mal

P.S. Check out the UCL Occupation blog here.
P.P.S. For those of you who find the link between the opening “dialogue” and the discussion of the protest odd, I should perhaps confess that the immediate inspiration for the first part of this thesis, may well have been this thread over at An und Fuer sich.

“…There is a light that never goes out.”

Nous sommes tous "indesirables"

On Monday afternoon I signed Overland editor Jeff Sparrow’s open letter regarding Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

I suppose I should be pleased (but not, obviously, surprised) by the fact that over the last two nights almost everyone in my Twitter feed (and the articles, blogs et cetera referenced by these people) seems to share my position on this issue. On the other hand, I’m also feeling strangely irritated with many of the 140 character or less statements that have been scrolling past my screen these past nights.

It’s not, despite what you might expect, just me having one of my ‘Jesus-I’m-bored-with-the-consensus’ reactions, although I’m certainly prone to such feelings. But no, the issues here are far too serious for knee-jerk, self-congratulatory, soi-disant ‘contrarianism’ , which, incidentally, is fairly high on my list of ‘things to renounce in 2011’ (along with caffeine, feigning deafness at parties, and trying to show that I like people by insulting their friends. )

It’s not even the worry that I sometimes have, that our ability to make choices about who to follow and what to pay attention to in the great phatic buzz that is Twitter potentially exacerbates the much-observed social trend whereby we come to live, increasingly, in comforting bubbles of our own creation, i.e. in the virtual world’s equivalent of a suburban McMansion where all anyone hears is the low hum of her own opinions being repeated back to her in soothing tones. We’re in danger of being able to craft womb-like worlds, which irrespective of the fact that they might be full of people (we all love to ‘socialise’ to use a disgusting word whose day I hope is finally done) are all sufficiently of ‘our sort’, that we can congratulate ourselves on having escaped from the Morlochs and the Yahoos who we dream are battering against the gates of our bubble in various vaguely threatening ways. (They’re not, by the way, except for when they are starving or watching their children being killed — otherwise they’re assiduously constructing their own bubble like the rest of us.)

In other words, I do sometimes worry that I’m in danger (at least in my social-media habits) of being a bit scarily like those millions of Americans who (as Dick Cheney once unsurprisingly claimed to do) ‘only ever watch Fox’ thereby insulating themselves from the possibility of dissenting opinions and inconvenient truths. I also worry that this sort of social phenomena is in danger both of compounding the much lamented fragmentation of society as well as exacerbating the individual isolation that makes our polities so farcical. It is a process that has turned much public discourse and almost all parliamentary politics into the never-changing result of a few number-crunching algorithms that get applied to a once-every-four-years representation of immobile, partisan opinion. This is the very antithesis of the idea of ‘democratic-will formation’ through genuinely deliberative collective processes that Habermas famously holds as constituting the ‘normative content’ or in other words the fundamental and authentic ideals of democracy.

Of course, the root of this deterioration of the public sphere is not technology (I’m with Badiou when he makes his anti-Heideggerian remark: ‘one more effort technologists if you would still work the planetary reign of technology!’). Instead, it’s a consequence of the latest ‘consumer’ phase of capitalism which, as we’ve seen over the last thirty years, exacerbates a tendency that was already present in incipient liberal democratic society (c.f. for instance Toqueville’s famous remarks on such things in Democracy in America), namely, a tendency for us to combine the sound political notions of equality under the law, and a right to free speech and free thought with the even more noble and beautiful philosophical idea that all human beings are fundamentally equal into a caricature of these principles whose major result is that we start thinking of our opinions as golden, sacrosanct little treasures — ‘identity markers’ — which, in a world where we are unsure of who we are, become the cherished children of neurotic middle-class parents: never let outside and ringed round with fences lest Little Hugo ever have to go through a day feeling insecure, or sad or ignorant, or as if the ‘Celestine Prophecy’ weren’t a piece of high-minded ancient wisdom for a cynical modern world. [vomits noisliy over the keyboard]

But, despite what I’ve just said, when it comes to Wikileaks, my principle gripe is NOT with the predictable homogeneity of opinion in my limited virtual social-milieu, especially because homogeneity of opinion is not always, or in itself, a bad thing.

After all, what’s wrong with the argument that I put up previously (or what you could call the other side of that same argument) is that, today more than ever, a vast army of cranks and cynical ideologues take refuge in the all too easily-established and sometimes breathtakingly cynical pose of the embattled truth-speaker bravely daring to ignore the bleating of the hoi polloi while mixing obvious falsehoods with spluttering non-sequiturs in a generally brow-beating, tub-thumping manner. It’s not that this pose is not necessary or that anyone who adopts this pose is merely a poseur, but it is also, I think, something that we see more and more used an excuse-note (“Sorry my contrarianism ate my capacity to look at facts or reason logically”) or people who ingenuously or otherwise enjoy dressing up their penchant for nonsense under an ill-fitting cloak of Socratic virtue. (Conspiracy theorists and ‘pi is equal to three’ scientific cranks are notable members of this category.)

In any case, if my major goals in life were simply related to relieving the monotony of my Twitter feed, I could always seek out and sign up to the rabid “Assange must die” opinions of RandomCrazyU.S.Tea-partySupportingLunatic#3264.

Having said this, however, I do feel a strange and sudden need to politely request that my friends and comrades of the Australian left , and indeed any good liberals and conservatives out there who share our horror at the thought that our government would ignore the rights of one of its citizens for a few plausibly deniable crumbs of diplomatic kudos, please refrain from some of the more jokey ‘eyebrow-raising’, wide-eyed, and faux-ingenuous, wonder-what’s-going-to-happen-next?!? comments about Assange’s current incarceration.

To explain what I mean here:

There are, I think, -two- issues regarding Assange. One of these issues is, I think, relatively clear; the other is almost entirely obscure. The obscure issue is, of course, the Swedish rape and sexual assaults charges, on which, let’s not delude ourselves here, none of us has, at least at this stage, sufficient information or evidence to say anything definitive about guilt or innocence, let alone about CIA plots. On this topic, because I couldn’t have put this better myself, please c.f. the following.

The more clear-cut issue, I think, concerns Wikileaks itself. Here I think the major issues are unambiguous. Whatever we think of Wikileaks -and for myself, I think there are reasons to think that its primary function is salutary and even necessary (and indeed that those who run it are high-minded and courageous) — no one deserves to be denied their rights as a citizen because our government wants to score a few points with a rattled diplomatic ally. Even more so, the people (mainly in the U.S.) who are baying for Assange’s blood are, to steal a phrase which my friend Cameron Shingleton used recently – “risible without being funny” and need to be opposed as we would any kind of foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy.

Nonetheless, what has worried me about some of the pro-Assange twitter comments (with which as I say, I am almost always sympathetic) especially from sources less reputable than Jeff Sparrow, is the way that some of the comments remind me of something that I’ve seen on similar occasions where the media has raised the possibility of the potential for a bad situation to get worse, or a current miscarriage to turn into a gross abuse. I’m talking here about a kind of ghoulish pleasure taken in the anticipation of the dirty, quasi-totalitarian strategies that might be used to spread lies, and distort the truth. Thus, I thought that many of last night’s tweets had this bizarre quality of seeming to say:

“Oooh. Ooh. I bet the CIA will have Assange ‘whacked’ next. Just wait for the Reichstag fire: they’ll plant 10kgs of heroin on his body, fake a video of Osama bin Laden saying ‘Julian is my best friend’ and then they’ll take Wikileaks down and everyone who ever worked for them will end up in Gitmo Mark II, while claiming that they abused children…”

What worries me about this kind of talk (which I’m obviously exaggerating for the kind of cheap rhetorical effects in which I specialise), is not that the kind of scenarios that they refer to are impossible, but rather that they are in danger of distracting us from the fairly straightforward fact that the Australian government is, right at this moment, committing an act of gross injustice towards Assange by denying him the chance of returning to his country. We may be right to suspect that all kinds of dirty tricks will be used in the future to take Wikileaks down, or that various cynical, powerful people who are outraged at the audacity of the organisation and its founder will do terrible things to revenge themselves of political embarrassments, but in the meantime I think that those of us who fear this kind of situation should limit our wink-nudging about its imminence. This is because I can’t help feeling that failing to do this is in danger of making us look like we enjoy our collective cynicism about nefarious super-powers more than we enjoy campaigning against said nefarious actions.

As Zizek has pointed out since his first publications in English, cynicism is not a weapon against contemporary ideology; it’s the form that ideology takes today. As everyone’s favourite Slovenian lunatic says himself, it’s a case of ‘fetishistic disavowal:’ ‘we know very well what we’re doing, but continue to do the worst.’ If you need proof of this (fairly obvious) point, I challenge you to name anyone who you’ve ever met who admits to being a dupe, who says ‘I slavishly follow the opinions of others’, or ‘I believe what advertising tells me.”

So, I’m just saying, I’m happy to share with people their outrage and indignation over the idea that Assange will be persecuted and threatened for running Wikileaks, or that sites will be closed down, affiliates harassed and so on, but I think that it’s not an occasion to show how much we enjoy the idea of positioning ourselves against a dystopian sci-fi world of the not-too-distant-future. Again, it’s not that such worlds won’t exist (or even that they don’t exist now) it’s just that our –recognising- this fact isn’t the same as us opposing it, or working towards a different future. And I’m not saying either that I have a problem with the ‘virtual solidarity’ that occurs on Twitter when terrible things happen. I’m as guilty as anyone as adding the 12,000th tweet saying: “Fuck, the IDF did -THAT-”, in the hope that someone will write back ‘Yeah, it’s outrageous.” It’s just that I think we need to be careful that we don’t transform the normal human reaction to want to share shock, horror and outrage, into a kind of ‘I can’t wait for things to get worse ‘cos then it’ll really get interesting’.

A much better idea I think is, rather than being cynical about institutions and nations that make high-sounding promises about freedom and justice is to call the bluffs of these people et cetera, i.e. to treat the very powers as if their rhetoric meant something. We should treat the statements of the powerful (even at their most preposterous) seriously, insofar as we should hold them accountable to such statements (in their very high-handed pomposity). And the best way to do this is not to conflate politics with our pleasure in sci-fi dystopias, or with congratulating ourselves on our ability to ‘see through’ (and thus potentially fail to see) obfuscation and lies, especially given that we live in a world where virtually everyone (on all sides of politics) credits themselves with the critical faculty to see through everyone else’s distortions. Soon, very soon, the right will say ‘ah, the left have made up such nonsense, made a hero out of a criminal!” and so on. Our response shouldn’t be, aha, well we see through your lies too, but rather: “Justice? Really, okay, how about you show us what you can do there.”

Best, Mal

P.S. Of course, I’d trade in almost any of these opinions if Kim Kardashian promised to stop tweeting. Principles are one thing, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Best,

Mal.

Today’s post is largely a transcript of a fan letter that I’ve just written with the intention of showing my inveterate admiration for Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen. If you have the misfortune not to know who these gentlemen are, I am here to tell you that these guys are to philosophy what oxygen is to the human respiratory system: wherever you find philosophy (by which I mean real philosophy as opposed to drivel, hocus pocus, meaningless posturing, or nominally left-wing “critique” that ultimately serves the champions of neo-liberalism) you’ll find Rosen and Leiter

(or the Brister and Mike

as I like to call them): giving the orders, manning the helm, and generally (you know I love nautical metaphors) steering the ship of thought past the rock of dogma and around the whirlpool of scepticism. These are the guys without whom philosophy will never reach the Promised Land where lucidity, clarity, and rationality hold sway.

Anyway, so here’s the letter:

Dear Professors Leiter and Rosen,

Although I’m not usually prone to unseemly gushing, recent events have forced me to write you this heartfelt public fan letter.

Initially, my letter was intended as a comment on Brian’s first-rate blog, but for some utterly inexplicable reason my attempts to post this as a comment were met only by the inhuman scorn of automated error messages.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I was initially very nervous about writing this (I mean, I’m sure you guys get things like this all the time and I didn’t want you to think I was just another groupie…) But, recently my Uncle Alberto (or maybe it was Oprah?) told me that I shouldn’t put off important things. We only live once, you know? L

So, given this, I thought, look, Mal, if you have an opportunity (even through so modest a medium as your rarely updated and insignificant blog) to publically express your gratitude to Brian and Michael (but especially Brian) you you shouldn’t shirk it. What is it that Hamlet says about cowards dying a thousand deaths?

Carpe diem. That’s right. Loosely translated it means…something about how it’s important to do things as opposed to not doing them. Or something.

So, anyway, let me start by saying that when I say I want to thank you both, I’m not just speaking for myself (an innocuous non-entity who will never amount to anything in the ‘real’, tough, manly world of contemporary academe) but for philosophy as a whole, for that whole two millennia long adventure that started with the life and death of Socrates.

Why do I (or rather, why do ALL OF US) feel so grateful towards you two?

Let me explain.

For a long time, like a lot of people of my blunted critical faculties and low academic rank, I languished in a sort of philosophical stupour. Although I thought that I was engaging in (or at least attempting to learn how to practice philosophy) I now realise that I have in fact spent the last 10 years wandering around in a state that Medieval monks rightly associated with “melancholia”, which they in turn associated (with great insight) with ‘acedia’ (sloth). A person afflicted by this condition would, according to the observant Abbots, find him or herslef in a situation in which the ‘sense of the world’ would seem to come unstuck, suddenly floating above the world to which it was once attached. This happened, for instance, to Montaigne when he fell of his horse and hit his head. (Note that some of this a reference to some remarks of Girogio Agamben, which I hope you can take as a sign of just how I’ve lost touch with what actual philosophy was all about.)

Anyway, as you can probably already tell, my problem, before encountering you guys was this: I had and, alas, continue to have, this terrible, ghastly disease. The major symptom of this disease is that, whenever I feel the need to try to ‘do’ [sic] philosophy, I inevitably feel compelled to stand around drooling reverently through my perpetually open-mouth at anything that is in any way obscurantist and pretentious.

The sad thing is that I feel compelled to do this, not despite but rather because of said obscurantism and pretentiousness.

Worse, whenever I encounter obscurantist jargon that is used as a cover for the speaker or writer’s underlying vacuity, I feel compelled, far from treating it with the Olympian hauteur that it deserves, to repeat said jargon in general conversation. This in turn leads to the flurry of non-sequiturs, that I call ‘papers’, ‘articles’ and even my (potential) doctorate’despite the fact that acutely critical minds like yourselves can immediately detect my disease and how far it has advanced.

When pressed by *real philosophers* on the issue of what, if anything, I actually mean, I take refuge either in saying ‘oh, it’s too complicated for you ordinary, bearded, clear-thinking, rational types to understand’. Alternatively, I say something hand-wavy about how beneath all of my apparent posturing I’m actually covertly advancing the cause of social justice, but that the cause of justice requires me to spit out as many bizarre (and vaguely relativistic) nostrums as possible, thus making sensible people rightly suspect that my torrent of verbiage is really just a way of temporarily distracting my interlocutor so that she doesn’t notice that all I ever do is dress up a few platitudes with unctuous drivel derived at French mandarins in the hope of seeming profound.

Thus — rather like a nymphomaniac sommelier on holiday — I feel compelled to both (literally and figuratively) leap into bed with anything that has a sexy French label, especially if whatever is behind the label starts spouting the kind of obvious nonsense that Professor Leiter has dedicated his not undistinguished career to exposing. In fact, I should probably admit right now, that I’m only able to write this note because I’ve (literally) shackled myself to this chair, otherwise, I’d be out there praising the sartorial splendours of any and all naked Emperors who came my way. Then — bang! — before you could say say ‘Sokal hoax’, or quote one of Brian’s fantabulous splenetics against Derrida, I’d be prostrating myself before the altar of whatever fashionable idol is presently forcing the gullible (and unphilosophical) masses to their knees.

Two things have saved me from this fate:

The first is, of course, my discovery of Professor Leiter’s blog, the aptly namedLeiter Reports, which is really the standard to which philosophy on the internet should be judged. From my very first 10 hour web session, on what I might call, with Stephen Colbert, the ‘repor….”, I realised just how much Brian’s blog tirelessly pits reason and clarity against willful obscurantism, brilliance against mediocrity, success against failure, academic probity versu dilletantishness and, finally, and summing up all of these virtues, “Brian Leiter” against all the hacks, nobodies and mentally deficient sophists of the world who aren’t honest enough to acknowledge that when it comes to philosophy Brian Leiter’s the Big Man on Campus.

I mean, Leiter’s a Harvard (okay, a Chicago) Professor for God’s sake, and when it comes to so-called Continental Philosophy he’s the guy who, literally – and as he himself so frequently and disarmingly says — wrote the book on the subject. If that doesn’t fulfill the criteria for being right about everything (and especially about what’s real philosophy and what isn’t) then I don’t know what is.

Also, Leiter gives advice to struggling students, and other people who want to know what’s really happening at the cutting edge of the Anglophone academic world. He tells us which programs and journals really matter, what’s the best way to go about the long march towards tenure and what you have to do to go from a nobody to Brian’s own lofty (“I see your philosophy and I rank it in comparison to myself”) position.

If this doesn’t seem like much to you, I would ask: who else could do this? No, really who has the combination of Big Player Insider Knowledge -and- the modesty and compassion to play this ‘mentor’ and counselor role to all of us hacks, wannabes and academic camp-followers?

To repeat:

Not since Socrates died has the young would-be philosopher been graced with someone like Leiter, a man who is, let’s face it, philosophy’s own indispensable gourmande-in-chief: a man whose philosophical palette is so refined that he can run (despite being an immensely respected Ivy League Professor with a formidable publication output) a blog dedicated to telling us young’uns (and not-so young- but nonetheless obscure types) what’s happening at the REAL CUTTING EDGE (or as we young people now call it the ‘Brian Leiter’ edge) of philosophy, as opposed to at the snake-oil selling, drivel-talking, bollocks-preaching, Reiki-practicisng, modishly but incoherently leftist, gormless hipster end, which is these days normally referred to as the “un-“ or the “not-very-Brian-Leiter” side of (so-called) “philosophy”. (The dittoes in the previous sentence are scare quotes, by the way and should be understood as such.)

After all, which young would-be philosopher doesn’t want to know who Brian Leiter thinks is the 22nd best philosophy academic in the world after himself? If Plato were alive, I know he’d be checking the rankings daily. So would Spinoza. Wasn’t it Hegel himself, after all, who (with fashionable anachronism) said that Leiter Reports was as indispensable as a gas mask in the trenches?

Now, sure there are a few malcontents and ne’er do wells out there who’ve sort of implied (in a preposterous obviously jealous way) that Leiter’s blog, might, far from being this edifying beacon which stops the untrained from crashing into the rocks of sophistry, in fact be an unbelievably smug, unbearably self-righteous exercise in extended self-congratulation equivalent to what would have happened if James Cameron had taken the full-page ad he paid for in the New York Times (mocking all of the critics who criticised Titanic) every day for a decade, before taking out antoher page that said: “I won an Academy award. Actually.”

But, of course, we know who these Leiter-haters are: dribbling morons and internet trolls all, disgraces to to philosophy, who no decent or self-respecting academic institution would even look at twice. Sure, THESE PEOPLE mightsay that Leiter is a bullying, hectoring, self-important, self-promoting prat, whose notion of ‘philosophical engagement’ , with his critics comes less from the ‘Philebus” and more from gangsta rap, insofar as his technique seems to mainly consist in mentioning how (Yo!) “all the serious people (and journals), AND IN FACT EVERYONE WHO MATTERS” are his (Leiter’s) homies,whereas only the losers and cretins dare to “diss him” — deserving outsiders enviously pressing their faces up against the glass of Fortress Leiter, or as we prefer to call it MODERN PHILOSOPHY AT ITS CUTTING EDGE.

But, anyway let’s face facts: as Brian himself would say, anyone who says this kind of anti-Leiter nonsense is (intellectually speaking) a weak beeatch: a pathetic internet Morloch, ‘ a twenty-something nobodies’ , or a philosophy drop-outs who couldn’t get a pass mark (I mean, grade) in one of Leiter’s (doubtless filled to capacity) undergraduate classes, and who, because of this, probably can be found with others of her ilk lurking together in the sewers underneath REAL academe thinking un-Leiterish (i.e. stupid) thoughts.

So, anyway: thanks, Brian. Without you I’d probably still be reading Derrida or those annoying bits of Deleuze or Nietzsche that don’t seem to fit with your world-shatterting reading of them as ‘naturalists’ in the analytic tradition. (Like, I mean, Bergson WTF?!? Deleuze was probably on crack. Sigh. The Sixties.) That and generally contenting themselves with the kind of philosophical junk food which would make your gourmande’s stomach righteously rebel.

So, like anyone who’s serious (“Leiterish”) about philosophy, I’ve been grateful to Leiter for a long time now.

However, what really forced me to write this fan letter (sorry if it comes off as too obsequious, but you guys make me literally and figuratively GUSH) was not a comment by Leiter himself, but rather a hilarious and frighteningly astute comment by “Leiter Reports” stalwart Professor Michael Rosen.

Just before I sat down to read Professor Rosen’s comments, I was in fact engaged in reading one of Alain Badiou’s books. What I didn’t know at the time was that this book is, in fact, totally vacuous, but cleverly hiding this fact via its injudicious (and willfully obscurantist) use of set-theory to intimidate the easily duped.

But, of course, guys like me still haven’t assimilated the Sokal hoax, so when I see drivel accompanied by equations (or ‘big words’) , I instantly turn from a critical/reflective mind into a quavering, oleaginous, toad-like being, reminiscent of Dickens’s Uriah Heep, who can’t help proclaiming that the aforementioned drivel is in fact ‘genius’, even though it’s obviously complete nonsense to anyone who isn’t delusional enough to have beaten their capacity for critical thinking out of themselves with an axe.

Worse, I now desperately feel the need to try to peddle this nonsense to unsuspecting young minds in the hope that the false halo of profundity passes (partially at least) on to my own head!

But then (bless him!) along came Rosen. With a single remark he did what years of what I once embarrassingly call ‘philosophy’ could never do. With one flick of a virtual eyebrow he insinuated that – and, brace yourselves, ‘cos this bit’s more than a little Oscar Wilde – that there were sometimes things which were actually, totally stupid and empty but that pretended to be profound by being obscure and talking about things like ZFC set theory. (Ha!)

Damnit, how did I miss this? How did I –not- realise that Badiou was shit dressed up as shinola?

Probably because I still haven’t looked up ‘shinola’ in the dictionary.

But ALSO because I, somewhere along the line, seem to have got myself embroiled in the charlatan-ruled “un-Leiterish” end of continental philosophy, the kind that barely even acknowledges Professor Leiter as one of the most important thinkers in the field. (which, incidentally he is, in a BIG WAY.) We’re talking about The.Man, after all, the guy whose philosophical gourmet report has the power to rate intellectual production by its similarity to his OWN WORK.

Given all this, it’s lucky that I have not only the model of Leiter to be the cynosure of my mind, but also Professor Rosen’s hard-headed, salutary skepticism to keep my volatile critical faculties from going kamikaze.

So, thank you too, Professor Rosen.

Without you and the happy little sycophants who applaud your snide bon mots, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between drivel and philosophy (a difference which, y’know, is always lost on us fans of willful obscurantists.) Must…go…out…and…worship…Protgaoras…)

Also, the other reason, that I should thank you is that you haven’t just saved an unprepossessing guy like myself from being gulled by a clever charlatan, it’s also, that you’ve (like Brian is always doing) struck a blow for reason and critical thinking everywhere by taking the correctly disdainful attitude to all this irrationalist, unwittingly Sarah Palin abetting nonsense.

So, y’know, it’s not just about me, it’s about the way you two have re-asserted the unfinished project of Enlightenment in an Age of Darkness and Chaos, how you’ve restored dignity and seriousness to philosophy which, but for your intervention would still be mired in the too-glib sputum of shamans and spirit-seers. If only there more people like you things like terrorism, religious fundamentalism, the Tea Party, and the U.S. Republicans, wouldn’t exist, or would (as Douglas Adams puts it) disappear in a puff of logic.

This is why, when we ask, who, in the world has done most to save the humanities (by ranking philosophy departments according to His Own Private Criteria) and to fight right-wing lunacy (by saying that right-wing lunatics are, in fact, bad), the one name that springs to mind is also the name of the eponymous hero of what will undoubtedly be the greatest ever Hollywood biopic: Being Brian Leiter (a film by Quentin Tarantino based on the Selected Self-praise of Brian Leiter)
• * *

Okay, now that I’ve finished with my impression of Professor Rosen and Leiter’s interior monologues, I’d like to mention, for anyone who hasn’t yet realised this, that this post is prompted by a recent discussion over at Brian Leiter’s blog Leiter Reports. The immediate context of the discussion is a link to and admittedly badly written review on the Notre Dame website.

Now I should note that not everything about said blog is as completely awful as the completely awful bits. For example it’s good that Leiter signed the Middlesex petition, posts links to things denouncing the stupidity of the American Right and so on.

At the same time, the tone of the blog is insufferable (see the examples below), especially when Leiter “faces up to his critics” or engages with the defenders of philosophers who he has summarily exiled to the periphery of the Leiter ‘in-group’.

It is in this climate that we find Rosen’s throwaway remark about Badiou (in the comments thread) of the above linked post. The comment is risible, or rather would be risible, if not for the trademark “Leiter Reports” combination of smugness, ignorance and self-congratulation. If it were a mere quirk of Rosen’s it would have been worth ignoring; what’s irritated me enough to write this, is the unctuous praise that this comment has recevied from the other commenters on Leiter’s blog.

On the substantive issue:

First, as several commenters in the thread above point out, Badiou is a fierce opponent of obscurantism, of ‘ludic’ prose style and in particular of obscure posturing with pretensions of the kind that pretends to serve struggles for social justice, by cloaking relativistic platitudes in technical sounding jargon.

Second, Badiou’s work is largely about the importance of universality over particularism, about defending the Platonic notion of truth as something that can punctuate (transcend) a given language game, form of life, or a particular transcendental conditions of experience. It is, in many ways, about the rehabilitation of thought beyond the pathos of finitude that has characterized so much (continental and analytic philosophy) In addition, Badiou’s prose is also (a few gnomic remarks) aside a model of Cartesian clarity.

More idiosyncratically, one of the great things about his project (from my perspective) is that he is, in his anti-Kantianism, simultaneously dedicated to a ‘post-critical’ notion that thought can, in fact, grasp the Real (and not just a “correlate” of the subject and the world), but at the same time, which refuses to follow the path of the many positivistic schools out there that equate ‘realism’ with a belief that what exists is only what is presently counted as existing – a belief that results in thought abasing itself to other, more powerful discourses and generally deferring (pathetically) to a ‘reality’ principle that would make it the lap-dog of dominant ideologies rather than that which shows the hollowness of particular institutions, norms et cetera before the tribunal of ultimate reality.

Given this, although it may seem intemperate and strange to devote my first blog post in a long while to attacking Rosen and Leiter, I think that Rosen’s remark (and the spirit of much of Leiter’s blog) is reflective of something that is seriously deleterious to philosophy, and particularly to attempts (as Graham Harman notes) to allow for more worthwhile intellectual encounters across the parochial ‘analytic-continental’ divide

To be more specific about this: my analytic brothers and sisters are often good at coming up with names for fallacies.

Now, I’ve been wanting, for a long time now, to come up with a name for a partciualr fallacy that I think is rife in academic philosophy and that tends to surface particularly in the more embarrassing, failed attempts at philosophical conversation across the ‘great divide’.

The fallacy goes like this. Person X accuses Person Y of ‘gamma’, where ‘gamma’ is a particularly bad thing (like obscurantism, murdering babies, secretly wanting to take over the world, irrationalism, meaningless posturing, covert Stalinism, trivialism, empirical or ‘Berkleyan’ idealism et cetera).

Where X should then spend time arguing the case for why we should, in fact, attach the ‘gamma’ predicate to person Y, X instead indulges in an endless riff (sometimes snide and sometimes indignant) on how gamma is, actually, a bad thing.

The result of this is that various people (often X’s band of sycophants) will guffaw at X’s hilarious ‘put downs’ of how stupid anyone must be who embraces ‘gamma’. Correlative with his, if another person “P” comes along and says that the association of Y with gamma lacks any ground whatsoever, X (and co.) will immediately retort that P’s defense must be motivated by either willful blindness OR the fact that they too are (at least secretly or unconsciously) an apologist for ‘gamma’.

P, of course, will protest this, but will be drowned out by the sound of X and his cronies who are too busy engaging in long, orgiastic session of straw-man beating, frequently accompanied by an adolescent commentary on how the straw-man got ‘owned’ by the incomparably witty and incisive X.

But what gets lost in the midst of this is the obvious fact that statements about the stupidity or vileness of gamma, by no means prove that it is correct to predicate Y with gamma.

Now, everyone (and certainly every philosophy student) recognizes that what I’ve just described is a fallacy.

However, I’ve often noted that when people talk about thinkers who they’ve enjoyed disdaining for some time (on usually slim, or second-hand evidence) the fallacy is applied vigorously, as if it were in fact paradigmatically rational and even-handed. Why does this happen? For the obvious reason, that X is having too much fun (gets too much jouissance) out of thinking that they’re definitely NOT being the kind of person who would ever (fiendishly or stupidly) associate themselves with gamma.

In honour of this recent comment thread, I’m thinking of naming this fallacy the ‘Leiter’ or maybe the ‘Rosen’ fallacy.

Can anyone work up a Wikipedia article for me?

Love,

Mal

P.S. Of course, if either of these guys showed signs of having read anything by Badiou (by which I do not include statements to the effect of “I’ve, like, sooooo read a lot of Badiou. Actually. My judgments come from some of the most rigorous critical reflection of all time.”), I’d be happy to engage in, you know, a philosophical argument.

Even better, I could refer “Brian and Micahel” to the work of Ray Brassier, Alberto Toscano, Nina Power, Peter Hallward, or Bruno Bosteels, all of whom are very learned, very clear writers, who have all written excellent books not just slavishly repeating ‘Badiou: yeah!”, or forcing otherwise unrelated phenomena to fit his framework and calling it ‘applied theory’.

On the contrary, each of these figures, and especially, Toscano, Power, and Hallward have responded to Badiou’s thought, in creative and accessible ways that have nothing to do with “scaring unwitting audiences with numbers” (Witness for example Hallward’s excellent book on Haiti, or Toscano’s recent book on ‘Fanaticism’, or Power’s book reviewed on this site on feminism.)

But of course I’m not expecting that Leiter or Rosen, would either read more of (or about) Badiou

Instead, I’ve no doubt that within a few hours I’ll be told that I’m a tiny minnow and the people I’ve unjustly slandered are all the biggest fish out there, who all other self-respecting fish find adorable and heroic and that that’s why the big fish are, y’know, going to sue me for libel.

But this would be knocking on an open door. I mean, Jesus, unlike Leiter I don’t even have a pond to be big in. Perhaps I should create one.

Yours under the law,

Your loving comrade,

-Mal

P.S. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to relish Leiter’s mordant wit, nor his answer to the question ‘who’s a real philosopher’ (the answer is, in case, you’re wondering Brian Leiter”) here is something fun:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/simon-critchley.html

and

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/who_is_alexandr.html

By the way note the charming and typically Leiterish (“She starts out gushing about Alain Badiou (who would presumably be humiliated by the mangling of his ideas by this 20-something know-nothing)”

P.P.S. Oh, and Brian, please don’t take me off the Gourmet report because of this. I want my Michelin star.

"This is for the real philosophers!"

Gah.

As I said to a friend yesterday afternoon: I am a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. And, on a wholly unrelated note, I have a cold…

Anyway.

Some of you are aware that I recently went to a conference with the primary intention of seducing as many attractive people as possible with my wit and formidable dialectical prowess, and with the secondary intention of presenting a paper on Plato and Badiou.

Suffice it to say, that I BASICALLY achieved ‘b’, as long as your definition of the word ‘paper’ is sufficiently loose and you take the word ‘delivered’ in its original, that is, strictly postal sense. I also, of course, triumphantly achieved my first goal, as long as my imagination still counts as the main criteria for reality. Which it does…

By way of a cruel and unusual “warm-up” to said paper, I had given a sprawling and shambolic ex tempore beta-version of the same paper a week before to a group of mainly analytically inclined post-graduate students who were – as this group tends to be –extremely generous and patient with both my inchoate ramblings and with the completely alien material. In addition, said crowd asked a goodly [sic] number of intelligent, sensitive questions in the discussion period while mercifully resisting the temptation to cry ‘where’s Alan Sokal when we need him’ in response to me saying preposterous things like ‘mathematics is ontology’.

I gave the preliminary paper, because I’d long thought that I should attend the conference that I attended last week, because rather than despite the fact that said conference is infamous in ‘continental’ circles for being a suzerainty of analytic philosophy to the point that ‘people of opposite inclinations’ simply do not attend.

But, I wanted to go, both because a kindly acquaintance (not knowing how egregious I can be when behind a desk or a podium) invited me, and because I’ve long thought that I should attend this particular (annual) conference given that:

1) Even if I do sometimes agree with Deleuze/Badiou on the limits of dialogue in philosophy, I am not and have never really been a partisan when it comes to Anglophone philosophy’s tedious, and parochial-seeming “Great Divide”. Thus, as much as there are people (frankly, in all sorts of areas in the humanities and sciences) who I am unable to talk to on the grounds of their being frighteningly intellectually narrow, I have also been fortunate enough to meet people from all kinds of philosophical tendencies whose company I’ve enjoyed and from whom I’ve learned much. Given this, the ‘divide’, like all such things, is, I think, ultimately deleterious if not disastrous to philosophy. In particular, the stereotypes each group has of each other are — while sufficiently true to exist as stereotypes — sufficiently false, to deserve to be overcome as stereotypes. So, just as not all “continental” philosophers are artist-manque poseurs desperately trying to hide their vacuity by occasionally vomiting out bits of ill-digested jargon amidst gnomic pronouncements that ultimately amount to: “if our concepts were just a little more vague, everyone would be nicer to everyone else”; similarly, not all analytic philosophers are humourless, Aspergic train-spotters of the kind who might have been useful in Bletchley Park’s cryptography unit, but who otherwise deserve the name of ‘philosopher’ only if the word’s principle connotation is a person who would respond to In Search of Lost Time by suggesting that Swann would be a lot less worried about Odette if he’d thought through the consequences of first order predicate logic. Tee. Fucking. Hee.

Related to the above: I have a friend who argues (publically) that the term ‘continental philosophy’ is entirely a construction of ‘analytic philosophers’. Not sure if she says that the opposite is also true, but I still like the idea…

2) I do think that in writing and teaching, clarity is a virtue, despite the fact that this basically salutary belief is (I’m an Augustinian about evil) easily perverted into the stupid, philistine principle: ‘if I can’t instantly understand something, that’s surely because it’s (obfuscatory) nonsense.”

3) Again with the notable exception of the kind of people who treat an encounter with unfamiliar thought as proof that they are in the presence of obscurantist barbarians hell-bent on denying modus ponens, leveling the distinction between penicillin and a rain-dance and thus, er….y’know, apologizing for the Nazis : I do frequently appreciate the habit common to many of the more good-natured analytic philosophers of asking questions to just about anything. While certainly this can lead to the speaker being faced with obviously naïve questions: it’s surely a truth universally known that naïve, or ill-informed questions are often a) eminently philosophical and b) even where a) is false, they often provide the occasion for a a speaker to reshape her previous statements into a more cogent form. In contrast to this, some “continental-types” (fewer in philosophy per se actually, and more in the ‘theory-phobic/theory-philiac OTHER humanities) are too easily intimidated by the sense of a speaker’s expertise or erudition to do anything but nod and say ‘mmhmmm’ vigorously, particularly if the speaker has the reputation of being an eminence or is in anyway charismatic, in which case people will (as I’ve seen them do) watch their deepest-held beliefs be dismissed as total nonsense and still come out of the talk acting as if exceptionally cool Professor X had spent the whole lecture holding both of their hands, staring into their eyes, and saying ‘I believe you’, like the electronic monk in Douglas Adams’s first “Dirk Gently” novel.

In particular, I know one celebrity professor, in an adjoining department to mine, who since his arrival at my university, seems to have been constantly followed by an embarrassing, puppy-dog like coterie of academics and graduate students whose contributions to his seminars tend to be of the order of ‘that was wooooonderful…it’s soooo much like what I already think in My Own Work….” and other such surefire stomach-purgers. I’ve even seen the same coterie greet the most respectful and well-formed questions to the Master with rolled eyes, as if none but the most intellectually disabled would dare to say anything that could imply more criticism than: “I love you”. Ce n’est pas magnifique et ce n’est pas la guerre. And it certainly isn’t philosophy.

4) I am an inveterate believer in the notion that if you occupy the position of a despised or excluded minority , it is better to try to take Manhattan (followed, as Leonard Cohen rightly, tells us by Berlin) rather than trying to accept the ghetto that will inevitably be proffered to you as being ‘perfectly nice in its own way’. Thus, when confronted with awful, pseudo-concessions of the: “sure, you ladies can’t write proper novels, but y’know you could write some damn fine ‘women’s fiction’”) the correct answer is not only the obvious “Sure, I will and how about you insert [name of blunt/spiky/uncomfortable sounding object] into your [name of orifice]…”, but also to immediately try and write a novel to (paraphrase a line of Orwell) that will knock Proust into a cocked hat.”

In context, Orwell was saying that he knew thousands of people in Paris with this intention – mainly upper-middle class expatriates — and I’ve always found the phrase particularly endearing, again, because rather than despite the fact that my crappy visual imagination fails entirely to add the adjective ‘cocked’ to the hat that the sentence conjures up. Sure I could Google it, but we all know this would be ruining the magic.

5) Now, obviously, my own presence at aforementioned conference meant exactly doodly-squat to the noble sounding principle I just mentioned, especially as I was confined, by reasons of time, vague social guilt, and stupid “stream-loyalty” to a very narrow choice of papers. Nonetheless, I do of course agree with myself [sic!] that my ‘”storm the citadel — even if it makes you look like a lone looney” principle – is a good one. Also, there were many more ostensibly ‘continental’ types at said conference than I initially expected: watch, O ye mortals, for our trickle will one day be a deluge.

Anyway, apart from not doing much frolicking (I spent the first of only two nights in which I stayed at what should have been a 5 night conference pathetically, in my small, cold, room, in the company of a bottle of carbonated water and the 100g bag of crisps that was my dinner): attempting to write my paper, which was nearly 4,000 words longer than it should have been by 3.30am while still being good only in comparison to my previous shambolic talk.

But apart from this I did see:

a) An excellent paper by a young English academic on Marx, who put forward a trenchant, elegant and I thought knock-down case against various well-intentioned attempts to uncover the implicit ‘normative’ (i.e. moral) basis of Marxist thought. He also made a very instructive comparison between Marx and Foucault which is still making me resolve to find the guy’s book and read it before any sensible person can tell me off from finding another tangent to distract myself from my thesis.

b)Several fine, thought-provoking, elegant papers on Plato, although many of these excellent papers (by lovely people) did, in a very indirect way, give rise to the speculations which I’ve scribbled below. As background, the older I get, the more unequivocally I love Plato. I’ve even recently gone and made shambolic and quixotic attempts to teach myself (with the help of an equally masochistic friend) Attic Greek. Consequently, I still have nightmares about the passive aorist, the mysteries of endless participles, third declension nouns that resemble other third declension nouns IN NAME ONLY and those God-cursed enclitic particles that appear for no reason and seemingly do nothing to the sentence. (Ah, dit donc? Doch!)

c) Two keynotes: one utterly, utterly awful one on ‘responsibilities to oneself’, which unfortunately managed to be an amalgam of every bad stereotype that I have of analytic moral philosophy: from humourless jokes to feeble attempts to reflect on the content of something purely from the point of its logical structure with the result of presenting constant tortuous banalities and false paradoxes as if they were the inevitable solution to an equation and cii) a later, elegant keynote speech, which, although it was still not exactly “my kind of philosophy” left me, and I believe everyone else in the audience, in a mood of hat-doffing salutation: it’s quite something to watch someone who seems like a kindly old lady in her late 60s take on analytic eminences as if they were so many flies buzzing around her afternoon tea…

Okay. Enough of the background.

I’d now like to leave you with some of my immediate, post-conference thoughts, in the hope that you will relate similar experiences, comment, or at least somehow build an enormous gilt statue of me in the plazas of your minds.

N.B. Some of the following remarks have a direct relation to certain papers/discussions/drunken arguments whereas others have only a very oblique relationship to these same: so, if you were present at said events, please don’t leap to the conclusion that any of my things, are a coded way of saying ‘god I hate that guy….”

LESSON NUMBER ONE:
</strong>Glib, shibboleth-swapping hacks and Pious Philologists are Equally Capable of PROJECTION when it comes to reading text. Which is disturbing.

>2. I want a monstrous Socrates

Upon seeing the first version of my Badiou-Plato paper, a friend of mine said something so nice, and so immensely pleasing to me, that I really wonder whether my memory hasn’t just conveniently omitted the point where I bribed him into making this pronouncement. In essence, said ‘friend’ (who is er…really real and not at all a figment of my imagination…ahem…) said that my first ‘warm-up’ presentation reminded him (amidst all my drivel about axioms) that Socrates was a monster in a way that caused him to revise some of his own remarks in his thesis upon finding more and more evidence as to this monstrosity in the dialogues.

I was pleased by this, not only because I am an egomaniac’s egomaniac (c.f. my cover photo on “Egomaniacs! Monthly”) but because I realised that this notion of ‘monstrosity’ is definitely something I think about Plato. Consequently, one of the things that I like about reading Plato with Badiou (preposterous as it might be) is that you get a ‘Plato’ utterly irreducible to Alain de Botton-like nostrums. Who after all wants a Plato who exists simply to affirm what are already our platitudes?

In essence, I realise that I treat “Socrates” much as some of my more favoured theological thinkers (I’m thinking particularly of Kierkegaard) will treat Christ: i.e. as someone utterly, monstrously, irreducible to ordinary ethical categories, or to the canons of polite sociability:

A figure who says things like: “Sure, you follow the commandments…but you want the Kingdom: how about you give up everything you own and follow me…”, a person who ignores his family, who points to love beyond the law, and who breaks with the respectable morality by hanging out with prostitutes and ‘tax collectors’, a figure whose claim to be ‘God suffering and dying and incarnate’ is, and indeed must be, as St. Paul says a ‘scandal to the Greeks and Jews’ (meaning, as Badiou points out) that it is something utterly nonsensical both to ‘our traditions’, to ‘the old ways’, to ‘what has always been done and seems natural’ as well as to the ‘respectable or modish intellectual or elite opinion.’. Thus, when I hear soi-disant Christians talk, I am constantly bemused by those who claim that their Christianity lies in either general bourgeois respectability (hard work, looking after your family &c.), or, worse, if you’re a member of the Christian right, a certain judicious, daily amount of not-being-gay (?!?). Instead, isn’t the whole point, far more…enticingly, appallingly mad: the demand that you love your fellow human beings not only as friends who share the same interests, nor as suffering victims who are conveniently acceptable when they are distant and pitiable but instead that you love all humanity at its most frail, annoying and unbearable, that you are committed to the idea (and will work for the realisation of the ideal) that the poor, the meek and the despised will inherit the earth (and deserve to inherit it), that you believe we are required to act with a capacity for forgiveness, kindness et cetera that is, frankly (and here Christopher Hitchens is right) inhuman.

Now, his own (doubtless gratifying) lack of pretensions to divinity aside: a human-all-too-human Socrates is not something that I think would render him worthy of puzzling over, except to the extent (and this also is true, of say Kierkegaard’s reading of Christ) the traces of his ordinary humanity participates in an admixture with the monstrous (where the monstrous is perhaps a good way of translating Badiou’s idiosyncratic sense of the ‘Subjective’). Lacan, speaking of Socrates and Alcibiades speaks of Socrates’ agalmar that which is in ‘him more than himself”, and both concepts, to me, grasp something of why I like Graham Harman’s suggestion that we should replace Hegel’s Owl of Minerva with (H.P. Lovecraft’s) Chthulhu as the symbol of philosophy…philosophy as the monstrous gaze of a monster on a series of monsters: itself an attempt to be faithful to a monstrous injunction…

1) Peter Hallward’s book is still definitive, not only as an introduction to Badiou’s work, but for still being the best secondary text on Badiou available in English. However, I now rank Ed Pluth’s book as the second best book on Badiou after Hallward’s: giving Pluth extra points for being able to achieve as much as he does in very little time. Oliver Feltham’s book is, while undoubtedly good and obviously written from a position of mastery of the material, I still feel, less helpful than either of the other two, perhaps because of Feltham’s familiarity with B.’s work: his (short) book does less of a good job, of doing things like anticipating reader questions. Last in the race, at the moment, I would place Jason Barker’s book, which I think is actually quite –bad-. First, it shares with Christopher Norris’s book the disappointing tendency of not only avoiding even the vaguest attempt at a guide to the mathematics (which let’s face it is the tricky bit), and also making Badiou seem a less interesting and attractive precisely in the moments in which he is being praised. Adrian Johnston’s book on Badiou and Zizek is also, I think decent academic work, but I have not finished it yet and don’t quite know where to rank it…

As well as earning my approval for the admittedly not very good (in fact, extremely shallow) reason that I had from the beginning of the article, a strong sense that its author a) loved Plato and b) shared my sense that everything about the contemporary education system in Australia is to thinking what a certain RECENTLY EXPLODED BHP OIL RIG IS TO THE MARINE LIFE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO, the article has the refreshing quality of not offering any comfort to any of the “usual suspect” ideological factions that I’m so used to watching swatting at each other in the staged (and immensely kitsch) wrestling matches that are most debates on “education” and [pronounce with hand-wringing earnestness] “Our Children’s Future”.

Thus, Bartlett has no time for (and consequently makes no reference to) either the forces of vague, sentimental, oddly contentless educational conservatism (which, in any case, is condemned these days to making poignantly quixotic suggestions about how it might be nice if students could, maybe, y’know, KNOW HOW TO READ by the time they left university with their swag of higher degrees (as if nothing had changed in the world since the days of Matthew Arnold!), while at the same time refusing to sing the praises of this faction’s equally sentimental rivals in the ‘progressive’ [sic] camp whose continual promises to save humanity on an almost hourly basis nonetheless always manifest themselves (in reality) as making it compulsory for anyone dimly associated with the university to make obligatory (but meaningless) genuflections to whatever simultaneously vague and vapid slogans are currently being cooked up in whatever banality-laboratories where people write papers on things like ‘building a rhziomatic vision of classroom dynamics for a new global society of creative-autonomous-people’.

Instead, and here, I admit that I’m wilfully engaging in the not very salutary habit, of pretending to read an author’s mind in order to suggest that it’s compatible with my own, Bartlett seems to have the refreshing (and accurate) sense that every ideological group in the battles over education is at once as responsible and as irrelevant to the state of education today as any other, simply because each and every group is equally guilty of either happily capitulating to (or ineffectually opposing) today’s “capitalist realist”, corporate university with its lustreless, managed-to-death, three-day-dead courses, its morally crippled, harried, frequently bitter staff, many of whom are mired in insecurities and hopes of escapes to another world (the U.S.?) and its mass of students, (graduate or undergraduate) who are forced into either disappointed stupefaction or a horrifyingly glib, cynical self-instrumentalisation by the contradictory imperatives of, on the one hand, their few, sincere, and truth-seeking teachers, the odd occasionally world-shattering book (for the very lucky only) and the constant, senseless imperatives of a degree conferring assembly line whose perspective on pedagogy most recalls the way a pterodactyl might regard the poems of St. John of the Cross.

And yet, of course, no-one can blame students when we know that their teachers are spending all of their time dancing pathetically and/or resentfully to the drum of the latest “watch-how-presumed-hyper-rationality-turns-surreally-irrational” Kafkaesque program for enhancing departmental efficiency in the hope that a given department might receive the occasional crumb for their management masters. The result of this, is that if teachers and academic don’t end up beaten and unemployable paranoiacs, furtively inventing reasons for how their genius could be compatible with their present lack of status or position, they end up with that mixture of casual self-regard and insecure narcissism that is the real gift of corporate-consumer-secular-Calvinist- to the annals of human potential.

Mostly, the transformation of teachers into glib, or despairing administrators seems to occur via the constant pressure of contradictory imperatives (publish!, but also make sure you spend all your time discharging your administrative/invigilating/self-invigilating roles; educate, but, for god’s sake don’t waste time on students — most of them are losers who won’t make it, anyway — save what you can, people, save what you can: let the dead bury the dead.” “And anyway, you should, in essence, see yourself kind of like the hosts of a reality t.v. show, your task isn’t to change the game, it’s to pronounce in alternately portentous and faux-sympathetic turns: ‘you win/you lose’: “heads you go up (maybe to the scramble of U.S. graduate programs) tails you go down: and we all know that, in the main, those nice looking, self-confident private school types will get what they wanted, and the other little nobodies will sink back to the plebian mass from which they came: all you have to do is rubber stamp this. “Be idealistic, but, hey, never forget that this is a business. Be creative, but, y’know, ‘creativity’ means being creative in relation to any number of rapidly changing norms laid down upon you from management degree carrying morons who are given more money than Croesus, to act like they have more power than God, but who actually discharge their major functions by changing the names of a few departments, halving the number of staff in a given department and making sure everyone has to fill in forms, in which they answer questions, like, do you think you’re acquainted with the cutting edge of your field or b) disregard it in the name of doing -things- that have escaped our bureaucratic reality measuring system?

Now, in the midst of all this, the thing about Bartlett’s essay is that it is not just the standard whine (like mine, above) about the debacle of contemporary education. Instead, Bartlett’s essay attempts to show as precisely as possible, what it would mean to say that everything about the contemporary university is designed to not only stifle, but to render unintelligible the very idea of an ‘education by truths’. So, here he’s not just complaining about the rule of management hacks, he’s instead taking the effort to show, how even our most idealistic CONCEPTIONS of education and university, still, limit the idea of education to the promotion of what we already know as (social) ‘goods’, and the prevention of what we already think of as social evils.

Against this, if you’ve been paying attention to any of the posts on this blog, you should know by now that Badiou’s version of truth has nothing to do with facts (with knowledge, or with what he calls the ‘encyclopaedia’, i.e. the totality of what ‘we’ (discourse community, society et cetera) consider to be true at a given time. Instead, as I’ve said in several posts, we’re talking about the ‘voyage-into-the-unknown’ creative rigour (or as Badiou likes to say ‘logical revolt’) of a procedure that stems from axioms that are themselves a response (by a subject who comes into being only in this response) to something whose status, is. in the last instance, unknown because it is undecidable (in other words: what Badiou calls an ‘event’) I’m not going to say more than this here, as a) I’ll refer you instead to Bartlett’s article and b) I’ve already gone on about such things …a bit…if shambolically in my review of Nina Power’s book, or even) the ‘Middlesex’ post.

But I still want to note a couple of things:

First, a tantalising highlight of Bartlett’s essay: the article contains a remarkable section on the way that the three approaches to art (didactic, romantic, classical) that Badiou describes in his first chapter of his Handbook of Inaesthetics give way to three distinct (and even opposed) pedagogical models, each of which, is nonetheless as guilty as any of the others in proffering a vision of pedagogy as something that is completely exhausted by what Lacan famously (and sneeringly) called the ‘servicing of goods’ [service des biens]. The implication here, is that whether the system is thought as ‘inculcating bureaucrat x’s idiosyncratic version of civic or social virtues, facilitating the development of an individual student-cum-artist-cum-entrepenueur’s “talents”/ the cultivation of their potential, OR the various ham-fisted attempts to make sure that as many young people as possible come out with the ability to pay lip-service to some vague, tortuously expressed and effectively meaningless bien pensant opinion (“no ordinary concepts can do justice to the ineffability of people’s DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES…”) each of the three conceptions of education provide, in the Bartlett/Badiou’s schema one facet of the contemporary educational melange. But the point is that none of these conceptions LEAVES ROOM (collectively, or individually) either at the level of their fundamental concepts, nor in terms of their institutional instantiation for the idea of education as something sufficiently ‘transformative’.

Now, of course, it might be rightly objected that talk of “transformation” and “the transformative” is precisely an education bureaucracy term: it’s as perfectly ‘sloganworthy’ as vague variants on ‘challenges’ (which are always ‘new’). Nonetheless, Bartlett is still right to maintain that none of the three ‘modes’ of education (as outlined by B&B) allow for the possibility that anything happens in education that we don’t already know well-enough to either seek to ‘promote it’ as a good or ‘diminish it’ as something injurious to our (contemporary society’s) perceived ‘goods’: what education lacks is a thought that would see it as related to a dedication to a process whose goals and procedures are at once completely unforeseen and invisible to NOT ONLY the managers of the university “business”, but the ethics committees, the well-meaning societies for the continued promotion of “vague sounding awkwardly expressed moral abstraction y” and so on. And yet, what Bartlett is talking about is not just a rejection of some pallid education department vision of ‘values promotion’, but ALSO and the same time a rejection of the idea that education is about some ineffable cultivation of the individual’s hidden potential. Instead, he’s trying to speak of education as something that is precisely ‘generic’, i.e. something that is not about the discovery of an individual’s collective talent, or a culture’s indefinable richness, or a society’s most treasured ‘norms and values’, but instead, about the ability to expose people to something (a truth process) which exposes the void in our ‘situations’ (the way we think about things, count things, group reality together) such that the subject of education encounters (and is defined by the encounter) with reality’s that combine in ways that, in lacking a name, have the potential to be a place where the names of that which goes uncounted, the unauthorised combinations, in short, a series of universal visions might emerge.

Thus, Bartlett:

….State education works its magic on the ‘what we always already are’ —the animal with interests inscribed in the signifying chain, interests expressed materially by our activities within the service of goods. How does a state education function in this way? Precisely because it prescribes, through its errant power to deploy its knowledge, ‘what we will do’ and what we will do subject to its demand is [to] enter somehow, someway—with a school certificate or with a PhD—into the service of
goods. And the more we enter into it as Lacan says, the more it demands. Thus what this demand must prevent
is ‘…the least surge of desire’.

(Bartlett, p. 52)

The opposition that Bartlett mentions between desire and the service of goods plays a pivotal role in Lacan’s Seventh Seminar, in which Lacan posits ‘an ethics of psychoanalysis’ that (along with his infamous Kant/Sade coupling) posits a notion of ethics as — not being about the promotion (as in utilitarianism) of some recognised good or another, but rather about the ‘not ceding (giving up) one’s desire”, about a commitment to processes that are defined by their unrecognisability to (the social-symbolic) recognition of the good. (Thus, Antigone, is one of Lacan’s models for this psychoanalytic ethics, which does not serve what is recognised as the city, but who instead, stands in as a model fo a desire that is not a sum of our recognised attractions and aversions, or what–has-already-been-recognised-defined/counted as “my”, “her”, or “our” interests, predilections, goals, projects and so on. The ‘drive’ of Antigone, is instead, for Lacan, associated with something which exceeds (and is unintelligible to) the ‘symbolic’ (the order of society and the order of language), a part of us that makes us do things that in not being directed to the system of exchanges, needs and wants (desire as the desire of the other), directs us at once beyond ourselves (as either little bundles of aggression-fueled-identifications and misrecognitions), and beyond the ‘accepted truths’, ‘values’ et cetera of our epoch, our time, our “city”. Instead, desire here, is related to that which, in taking us beyond the ‘service of goods’, allows us to think the good — to question the goals, that render these goods ‘in need of servicing’, as opposed to other potential tasks and activities which are obscured by our constant attention and devotion to other activities more sanctioned by the present economic-social order.

But, really, I don’t want to say more about this, here except a) read the essay here if you dare — the beginning may not interest those not already interested in Badiou, but I think it is worth anyone’s reading and b) I’d like to leave you with the following two footnotes from Bartlett’s paper both of which showcase some particularly awful examples of education bureaucrat Newspeak, in the context of Bartlett’s terse commentary.

43. This at once ‘conservative and eclectic’ tendency is ruthlessly at work in the theoretico-policy work of
the contemporary state system—at least here in Australia and especially noticeable within the ‘New Basics’
regime of Education QLD. It is also very to the fore in educational theory. This summary paragraph is
all too exemplary: ‘Each child, as a unique human being, can be enlarged and enlivened in the inclusive,
enactive environment of the transactional curriculum. In such classrooms the lived experience of students
and teacher co-exist, learning and knowledge co-emerge, the multiplicity of curricula converge, nature and
nurture co-originate as product and process; and, the cognitive and non-cognitive learning of each as Other
are brought forth through pedagogical love into a new world of knowledge, acceptance and understanding.
Truly, in such classroom settings… “the light gets in”, and heart in becomes heart of teaching’. Blaine E.
Hatt, (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education) ‘Heart In is Heart Of Teaching’, in (funnily enough) Ecclectica,
December, 2000, http://www.ecclectica.ca/issues/2002/4/hatt.asp
(Bartlett, p. 43)

[sorry, that "werawrehwaghgh" sound you heard while you were reading that was just me slitting my own throat with a big, sharp...collection of pedagogical love, acceptance and understanding Mal]

But, Bartlett has more of these:

71. In this ‘new and risky future’ the New Basics will deliver a student who is ‘flexible’, ‘adaptable’, capable of
a form of ‘self-analysis that copes with this flexibility’ and possesses an ‘educability’—for ‘retraining across
the life-span through a range of media’. The student will be capable of ‘designing him/herself a ‘social
future’, be proficient in the ‘care and maintenance of the self ’ and practice an ‘active citizenship’—within our
‘democracy’. It should come as no surprise that the theoretical parameters of the three year longitudinal
research of which the ‘New Basics’ is both a result and an experiment were coordinated by a constructivist
and reconceptualist paradigm. See, New Basics Research Paper. No. 2. ‘Synthesis and Research’. p.6 http://
education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/ and New Basics Technical Paper, pp. 85-6 Lacan’s remark in
relation to Sade’s treatise on the education of young girls should be recalled here: ‘The victim is bored to
death by the preaching and the teacher is full of himself ’, Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’, Ecrits, p. 664/787.

(Bartlett, p. 59)

P.S. Note to self: Perhaps the (education department idiot) portion of these quotes might serve as suitable contributions to
Cameron Shingleton’s “Pseud’s Corner”

P.P.S. Oh, and do check out the comparisons with Rancière’s “Le maître ignorant” in Bartlett’s footnotes ….