“Protest is when I say something does not suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that that which does not suit me no longer occurs”
-Ulrike Meinhof
So you’re in a restaurant and a man starts to choke. His table is immediately crowded by waiters and fellow diners who, by extraordinary coincidence, all happen to be opinion columnists, philosophers and social critics.
“Heimlich manuever!” you scream. “The Heimlich fucking manuever! Described in a June 1974 article by Henry Heimlich published in the journal Emergency Medicine!”
By the time the man lies dead in his soup four General Assemblies have been formed and are mere months away from agreeing that choking on food is indeed bad and that something should be done. #Occupyhypotheticalrestaurant is now a trending topic.
This is the position we find ourselves in today, summed up by the aforementioned Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism, which manifests itself amongst the Left as the sense that something must be done, but that nothing can be done- we are fresh out of ideas. For some this tendency expresses itself as a kind of political Millennialism in which we are (always) moments away from the coming of a Occupy Messiah, a new Marx who will lead His (or preferably Her) children in to the promised land. This is the impression one gets from Slavoj Zizek’s current writing, which seems to be saying that some of us now living will see the coming of the Kingdom (or Commune). Or in a secular form it appears as the Occupy movement’s abdication of responsibility for articulating an end goal.
The title may be an emo-core band name waiting to happen, but Slavoj Zizek is nailing it once again in this expanded version of his speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest:
The Western Left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, gay rights etc., struggles, “capitalism” is now re-emerging as the name of THE problem. So the first lesson to be learned is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not found in the slogan “Main Street, not Wall Street,” but to change the system in which Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.
There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but rather about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What new institutions, including those of control, should we shape? The 20th century alternatives obviously did not work.
It is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organization” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, but as we do so we should bear in mind the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: The open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new Master-Signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old question: “What is to be done?”
I’m going to post something to expand on the themes in this article shortly, but to whet your appetites:
Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet.
Max Weber, and more recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, addressed a parallel problem, but via moral and cultural sociology. To what extent and on what basis must capitalism serve our human needs and desires, if we are to remain committed to it? Immaterial needs and desires play a key role, as these are less easily exhaustible than material ones. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue:
Whereas capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process, people are satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its inherent insatiability.
The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright. Boltanski and Chiapello’s central argument is that capitalism has drawn on varieties of anti-capitalist critique in generating the ‘spirit’ which induces a sufficient mass of the population to remain at this finely tuned level of engagement. At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. [12] In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy.
Make no mistake about it, without plentiful, cheap, and easy to access oil, the United States of America would descend into chaos and collapse. The fantasies painted by “green” energy dreamers only serve to divert the attention of the non critical thinking masses from the fact our sprawling suburban hyper technological society would come to a grinding halt in a matter of days without the 18 to 19 million barrels per day needed to run this ridiculous reality show. Delusional Americans think the steaks, hot dogs and pomegranates in their grocery stores magically appear on the shelves, the thirty electronic gadgets that rule their lives are created out of thin air by elves and the gasoline they pump into their mammoth SUVs is their God given right. The situation was already critical in 2005 when the Hirsch Report concluded:
“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”
In the six years since this report there has been unprecedented oil price volatility as the world has reached the undulating plateau of peak cheap oil. The viable mitigation options on the demand and supply side were not pursued. The head in the sand hope for the best option was chosen. The government mandated options, ethanol and solar, have been absolute and utter disasters as billions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered and company after company goes bankrupt. The added benefit has been sky high corn prices, dwindling supplies and revolutions around the world due to soaring food prices. The last time the country went into recession in 2008, the price of oil plunged from $140 a barrel to $30 a barrel in the space of six months. I’d classify that as volatility. We’ve clearly entered a second recession in the last six months. So we should be getting the benefit of collapsing oil prices.
But, a funny thing happened on the way to another oil price collapse. It didn’t happen.
The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”
Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?
Since today’s article will concern blood, in a roundabout way, I thought that this was as good an excuse as any to post bloodbloodblood by Francophone Witch-housers (Witch-House dwellers? House witches?) Unison. It’s the closest anyone’s ever come to playing the music in my head, which is basically My Bloody Valentine and Atari Teenage Riot all at once.
So, while watching Adam Curtis’s documentary series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (which UK readers can watch on BBC’s iPlayer here) I noticed something. I was not repelled by watching three hours of a programme that is basically Conservative. All Watched… argued that modern society’s dependence on The Machines (you can hear the capitalisation in the voice-over) has led us to concieve of everything, from the eco-system (note the ‘system’ part) to human society itself as being essentially machine-like. The grand utopian visions emanating from Silicon Valley are shown to be empty headed shams that can be (somewhat tenously) traced back to Ayn Rand’s meth-induced crazytalk. This is all predicated on the Conservative notions of human imperfectability and what Samuel Huntington calls ‘the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions.’ Conservatism says, pace Edmund Burke, that radical change is a risky enterprise and that the few necessary changes to an existing setup should be careful and slow. Existing institutions develop in tandem with the non-human and historical environments that populations find themselves in, and are therefore already optimised to local conditions (some of the earliest environmentalists were politically of the far right- Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and fascist mystic Julius Evola for instance). As those conditions change institutions change with them, but it is folly, say Conservatives, to try to impose human will on the world.
There’s a reason that the above doesn’t sound like any Conservative you know. Glenn Beck, Bill O’reilly, Sarah Palin, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy et al. aren’t Conservatives, at least in any meaningful way. They, as Richard Hofstader pointed out over sixty years ago, are psuedo-conservatives (the article is really worth reading). They may pay lip-service to traditional values, but they are ready to sacrifice them at a moment’s notice when it fails the What Would Ayn Rand Do? test. Take, for example, the Traditional Family, which looks, contra George H.W Bush, something like The Simpsons: dad goes out to work, mom stays at home to look after the two-point-four children and they are still able to afford a four bedroom house in suburbia, two cars and college for their kids someday. They don’t just have material comfort but moral health based on a foundation of family and church. This life is inconcievable for most Americans, not because evil Liberals and their activist judges made lesbian communes a viable alternative to phallogocentric ‘houses’, but because real wages have stagnated as cost of living has gone up, meaning that Marge needs to get a job that lasts more than one episode (at the Kwik-E-Mart maybe?). Consequentially she can’t spend time with her children, cleaning the house or cooking (don’t worry, I tore up my feminist card when I wrote that), leading to a marked decrease in their quality of life. The kids have nobody to help with homework and they eat microwave meals in front of the television. The next generation grow up slightly worse (maybe not Lisa), get slightly worse jobs than their parents, live in slightly worse houses and raise slightly worse children. All that ‘moral degeneracy’ and ‘erosion of traditional values’ happens, and all because it would be Islamo-Socialism if the rich paid their share of taxes.
Arthur Miller once said that an era can be said to have ended when its basic illusions are exhausted. I would like to posit two things- that the current era will end once people stop listening to bloodless Italo-disco electro-pop and start listening to bands as grandiose, reverential and human as WU LYF, the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation. Their new video for ‘LYF’ is above and you can find my personal favorite song of their’s, ‘Heavy Pop’ Secondly, that Vanity Fair is writing articles like this:
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
The Great Approval: The Cuts Protests and Missing the Point Entirely
It’s been a while since my last post- no excuses, I got lazy and unimaginative, then work commitments interceded and I lost sight of my true purpose: to write wordy explanations of mostly non-existent philosophical tropes in exploitative, sexually depraved zombie anime padded out with the occasional post on boring news stuff.
That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been dilligently consuming and categorising various media entertainments though: I’ve enjoyed the HBO comedy series Bored to Death far more than I thought possible, loved the Coen Brothers’ True Grit even though I had the original confused with The Searchers, became very gay (in the video game Dragon Age 2, having chosen the far more dramtically interesting Hawke x Anders-by-way-of-Fenris romance option), invested in property (in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood- remember when these games used to be about stabbing people?) and discovered a totally alt dive-bar/restaurant chain called ‘Nandos’.
In other news, Liturgy and Burzum have both released new material. Burzum is, as I’m sure you’re aware, racist Heathen convicted murderer and church arsonist Varg Vikerness’s one-man band and his new album is Fallen, out on Byelobog (and Candlelight in North America). I prefer it to Bellus after one listen- the folk parts are better integrated and the closing instrumental Til Hel og tilbake igjen is so pretty that you almost forget that you’re listening to the work of somebody who stabbed somebody twenty-three times in the face. Liturgy are a little more acceptable amongst polite company- four guys from Brooklyn who inevitably attract the ‘hipster-metal’ moniker even though they may be making today’s most forward-thinking extreme music. ‘High Gold’ is from their new album, Aesthethica, which will be out on Thrill Jockey on May 10th. When I listen to this song I can’t help but think of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. See if you can hear that too.
Now, enough politically-questionable folk-metal, on to the matter at hand.
It is near impossible to persuade people that protests don’t matter, harder still to try and impress upon people that (in the Western world at least) taking to the streets en masse and demanding that a democratically elected government change its policies might actually harm the causes they support and strengthen the governments they are protesting against- and furthermore that the protests are not even aimed at political transformation, but fufilling the emotional needs of the participants to engage, however briefly and inauthentically, with forces bigger than themselves.
We romanticise protests- May ’68 is still the axis of world history for European intellectuals, we stare admiringly across the mediterrenean at the revolts that began in Tunisia earlier this year and tell ourselves that we did that- we gave the otherwise ignorant oriental rabble Facebook, Wikileaks and a No-Fly Zone (and now they’re trying to elect leaders whose policies accurately reflect the religious beliefs of their people! The cheek of it!) Never mind the 100% failiure rate of protests (as opposed to insurrection and revolts seen in the Middle East and earlier in Eastern Europe) or that no matter how brave and iconic, the Tiannamen Square tank-guy is either sipping Victory Gin and mumbling about how much he loves Big Brother or was taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot a long time ago. As Simon Jenkins points out in the Guardian, protests in the UK have always failed. Always. The only real progressive force seems to be blind, impersonal and bloodthirsty history making certain limited reforms economically necessary. Protests can coincide with these moments, as the Women’s Suffrage movement did with WW1, but they cannot and do not cause them.
I really wish that I could say that I haven’t posted anything in the last few weeks because I’ve been in Egypt fucking shit up with my revolutionary brothers and sisters and Atari Teenage Riot on infinite repeat, but the truth is that I’ve been trying to negotiate myself out of ‘emerging adulthood‘ and into wage slavery (or, failing that, actual slavery via internships).
Smart people have been saying smart things about the unrest that has spread through the Middle East since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on January 4th. Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek were on Al Jazeera as a double act, Johann Hari asked how the West can help and Foreign Policy has declared the whole thing a failure.
However, I’m a sucker for big picture thinking and a snappy title, so the article that has come out of the last six weeks that I would particularly like to highlight is Newsnight Economics editor Paul Mason’s ‘Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere’, a sane version of Glenn Beck’s Apocalyptic visions of an advancing Islamo-Communist Caliphate with a touch of the Beck-approved pamphlet ‘The Coming Insurrection‘ in its emphasis on solidarity-groups (‘communes’ in TCI) as units for revolutionary action and a good deal of Clay Shirky’s techno-progressive utopianism.
Each of the twenty points is worth a mini-essay (now there’s something to drive pageviews now that I don’t have Highschool of the Dead’s endless jiggle-parade to fall back on), but you can get the pre-digested version here, on the BBC website.
Terror and Fabulous are two words that sound unreasonably good when put together, so there's no reason that they should be monopolised by an acclaimed 90s Dancehall DJ and can't be used as the title of a blog by Gareth Watkins of near to London, England.
There's no theme.
Okay, there's a theme: Things Are Not Okay, but this site will ignore the way things are and promote the work of artists and intellectuals who show us hints of how things could be.
I post MP3s. I do this to promote awareness of certain artists and to encourage critical engagement with their music. If you are an artist whose work I have featured or the owner of any copyrighted material that appears on this site then your first step should be to consider how I've advertised your product for free and how sending me further .mp3s to feature would be good business sense, or to send an email to terror.fabulous(at)gmail.com requesting the removal of specific songs from the site, which I will respond to as quickly as I am able.
