Each Beautiful In Their Own Way

This and this. Delicately painted snails (via B3ta) and a deadpan-delivered history of the Depression partially re-written as comically bad sci-fi B-movie. Who says the internet isn't great?

A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do

More Valve Wire-commentary. I don't think it's as reifying as they seem to, but the idea of Omar as outlaw lawman is interestingly developed.

He Believes It's Not Coincidence

Hegel on Catholicism (from the Philosophy of Mind, paragraph 552). This would be one of the crazy bits in Hegel and so, in my mind at least, not like Kant:

...yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the 'host' presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annhilation of its externality, and in the act of faith, i.e., in the self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exlated to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality - of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order - which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but only to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying - partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject forgoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray - addressing his devotion to miracle-working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.

So this maybe explains why Alasdair MacIntyre doesn't talk about Hegel in After Virtue, despite that book being in many ways very Hegelian - MacIntyre is after all a committed Catholic, and Hegel clearly totally despises Catholics and does not shy away from listing, at some length, their faults. What's more interesting than that though - at best a passing note in the history of political
thought - is what Hegel claims is at the root of all of Catholicism's ills; it's conception of the sacrament, and specifically the moment at which transubstantiation takes place. That is real lunacy; as if a minor theological point is central to the political manifestations of a religion in which that minor theological point became important several centuries after its foundation. Lunacy, I tell you.

Not Quite An Apology

If no-one tells me to stop, I'm going to keep doing this.

Gli Occhi Devono Avere Loro Parte

No-one stuffed my mouth with gold:
Something glib, something easy, escaped instead;
No-one sighs, and I sigh back.

No-one shut my eyes with silver:
Something shadowed, something beyond, was seen;
No-one glanced, and I glanced back.

I only did what came naturally,
The second cigarette, quick, eager,
Riding the back of the first.

There should be more of a confession here.
The eyes must have their part;
If that’s what you want, and a quick laugh.

No-one gilded my eyes with lead
Or stuffed my mouth with rags.
I hoped and no-one looked back,
Reached and fell slowly away.

It was a winter count
Snow that fell snow upon snow,
Oubliettes, like dust on the wind,
An accumulation of increments, infinite.

For The Most Part Less Physically And Emotionally Expressive Than Neapolitan Dockers

As I've mentioned before, the Oxford graduate population is not particularly British, and so brings home to you the peculiarities of being British, makes you see that certain ways of doing and being that you accept as natural are in fact contingent, even if you could no more shake them off than your own skin. Of course, that cuts both ways: those members of Oxford's graduate population who did not grow up in the UK must find it odd and at least slightly disconcerting to be exposed to people who have different cultural specifities, since that is the understandable reaction to that experience, whether or not you are British. Indeed, it is undoubtedly much more disconcerting, since even if they are not totally hegemonic, typically British norms are dominant amongst that population, and that population is hardly the only one which people coming from abroad to study here will encounter. A foreign graduate student I know, for example, claimed that for much of the first year they were in the UK, they thought that everyone disliked them. They interpreted various forms of reserve, of awkwardness, forms of reserve and awkwardness which could all too easily have only been increased by failures to understand them as generic rather than directed, as a signal that they were not welcome. The turning point was apparently reading Kate Fox's Watching The English, which explained to them that all this apparent disinterest was perfectly normal.

I've not read Watching The English, and so perhaps it doesn't fall into the genre that I suspect it does, although any synchronic study risks doing so, because of the way time-slices ignore what has come before. Here, the sort of thing I'm thinking of is typified by what I remember of Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small Island, which I recall as being a artfully cobbled together collection of exercises in triple-distilled Daily Mail issue nostalgia, full of the glories of its common sense. As I've said before, this sort of thing, of which I'm sure Bryson's book is not the only example, naturalises existing social heirarchies, obliterates difference and opposition, gilds chains with flowers. It performs what I take to be the classic Orientalising maneouvre, and takes what it discusses out of history, placing a specific set of social relations, which redound to the advantage of those who occupy particular places in that structure, in statis, beyond the reach of change and so critique. It turns those who fall victim to it into patients, incapable of ruling themselves, trapped by their preordained and inescapable role. Unsurprisingly, I don't really like that kind of thing.

In a way, it's present in the attitude that the Labour Party has adopted to the power of the right-wing press in the UK whilst it has been in government. The attitude, notoriously, has been that there is nothing to be done about it, that the political centre-ground is where it is, cannot be moved, and must instead be placated. Achievement of traditional Labour objectives, if they're to be sought at all, is to be done stealthily, so that neither Murdoch nor the Daily Mail notice. Those who read those papers are turned into cultural dupes, and the formidable political resources Labour had at its disposal when it came to power in 1997 - a broken opposition, leaders unburdened by the mistakes and mishaps inevitably associated with a period in government, and not least a period of persistent economic growth - denied. Existing social relations are reified, and the power of particular actors - so obviously central to the long-term political success of Thatcherism - ignored. That failure to even seriously attempt to shift the terms of the political debate, as Chris says in comments here, is 'the great, great failure of the Labour government'.

It's also present in the attitude Paul Ginsbourg describes the leadership of the Italian Communist Party having in the aftermath of World War II in his history of contemporary Italy (and which I think Phil has described the continuation of into the Anni di Piombo and beyond). Terrified by the thought of Allied military intervention, either through proxies or directly, at any sign of communist take-over, Togliatti endorsed a policy of accommodation with the other anti-fascist parties, which seems to effectively meant that De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats got communist support for a series of measures which eliminated the institutional possibility of any serious disruption to the underlying Italian social heirarchies which formed the basis of their support. Land reform was designed to be both as sympathetic to the interests of big landowners as possible and to ensure that there remained a substantial class of small and marginal peasant proprietors, vulnerable to various forms of exploitation, while any idea of worker's control in industry was quickly squashed. More than that, the apparatus of the state and even the personnel manning it remained the same; Ginsbourg shows disturbing levels of continuity between the Fascist and post-Fascist police and judiciary, for example, lasting well into the sixties and seventies. The communists took themselves to be far more constrained by the situation than they were; even well after the peak of their post-war power, a failed assassination attempt on Togliatti was able to provoke a general strike which succeeded in taking over several Northern cities for days. They, like parts of the Labour Party, Orientalised both themselves and the population they found themselves amongst.

What's good about Ginsbourg's book in this context though is the way in which it's a counter to that sort of thinking. After having cast his hands up in the air at the Communists' refusal to make use of the power they had, Ginsbourg goes on to expose exactly the Christian Democrats did make use of the power they had, making sure that Italy had, insofar as they could control it, the character they wanted. Clientelism in the South, and forms of associationism often bound up with the Church in the North; the willed political acts which created those institutions for the benefit of the Christian Democrats in the fifties have shaped Italy since. To take that shape, that set of social relations, out of that history, in which groups and individuals exercised power, and could have done otherwise, is to misunderstand that social structure, to fail to see the ways in which it generated by the interplay of particular social forces. Likewise, Bryson-esque pieces of pop anthropology misdescribe their subject; we need to bring back the history, the history which exposes the way they are formed by political struggles and so the way in which they both encode power relations and can have new power relations encoded on them.

Picaninnies

Unsurprisingly, I think Boris Johnson can f*ck right off. What's much more disturbing than him as such - casually racist, misogynist and elitist upper class snobs are likely to be with us for some time, and other than seek to minimise their role in public life, there's little practical to be done about them: fencing off various appropriate parts of the country - Henley'd obviously be a beginning - and refusing to allow anyone who has either worn a rugby shirt or tracksuit bottoms as causalwear out seems a bit much - is that people don't seem to see that he ought to. On the other hand, I went into my MCR to pinch some of the pastries they have left over from the May morning breakfast, and noticed that an integral part of their advertising for their bop tomorrow is offering anyone coming in a bikini a free shot. They also recently had an apparently serious motion to investigate the possibility of installing a dancing pole in the MCR, at least during bops. I wonder why they don't just go the whole hog and start hiring hookers with the bar proceeds. They could run a lottery or something. After all, when MCR newspaper subscriptions were voted on recently, we ended up with the Hate Mail, the International Herald Tribune, and the Times, so there'd clearly be plenty of takers. There are reasons I don't go there very often, and they're not exhausted by the fact that I'm a grumpy misanthrope.

Edit, 03/05/08: The Guardian today is quoting - although I can't find it on the website: presumably someone in Tory Central Office realised that even unattributed quotes comparing themselves to Mussolini might not be wise, and had it withdrawn - an unnamed but ecstatic Conservative frontbencher anticipating Johnson's victory by saying "this is like the March on Rome in 1922". Londoners have elected a racist incompetent toff, supported by the contemporary fascists of the BNP and whose own party members invoke previous fascist triumphs as benchmarks for their own success. Ken wasn't a saint, but this is disgusting. Oh, and in the end, apparently going in Speedos got you a free shot as well. Gigolos as well as hookers.

To Act Always As We Have A Mind To Act

It is both easy and often appropriate to be scornful about euphenism and other imprecise language, and indeed, a central part of more or less any philosophical enterprise is clearing that sort of thing away, a kind of bureaucratic rationalization of meanings, bringing structure to a formless mess. But the power to name things is a power like any other, and the insistence on a certain kind of straight-talking, a hard-nosed refusal to tell it any way but the way it is, is a kind of insensitivity to the costs of the exercise of that power, a demand that the world be a particular way for everyone. Evasions, compromises, and equivocations can be the only way to speak to an audience of more than one, particularly politically: the mutual comprehension that making power's exercise acceptable to those who live under it involves requires needs give and take, needs us to bite our tongues. Which is of course what I found so attractive about that Obama speech: it cuts both ways, aims at a reconciliation. If it were completely honest, it could not help but take sides, and if it did that, it'd be impossible for it to find a common language in which to make power's exercise acceptable. If it adopted the attitude that, say, Orwell does in 'Politics and the English Language', it could not work and that would be a loss.

I've always been pretty sceptical about that essay: it's so tempted by an authoritarian machismo, not quite able to shake itself from the thrall of a moral universe exactly the opposite of that which animates a worry about public reason. Telling it like it is can be reifying, a denial of other people's right to interpret the world around them within certain reasonable canons, to make sense of it for themselves. Of course, there are limits to the acceptability of Unspeak: dead children are always dead children, and dead children killed by bombs are always dead children killed by bombs, just as simulated drowning is a form of torture and not a mere aggressive interrogation technique. There's no room for reasonable disagreement there. Likewise, I think, the existence of climate change, and the damage it's likely to do. But that leaves a lot where Orwell's demand for the elimination of euphenism and obfuscation is a step too far: having agreed that climate change is to be avoided does not decide how to achieve that goal. Even more than that, as a general demand about how to use language, it's totalitarian: it destroys the possibility of so many different forms of literary expression. Presumably one reason Shakespeare never described his characters speech with verbs other than say is because he never described his characters speech directly: one would hope that actors could convey a variety of modes of speech. Equally, Elmore Leonard writes in a particular genre, with particular stylistic conventions. He might as well demand that all other forms of fiction employ only variants on the weary cynic waiting to be roused into a last burst of idealism as a central character. English has a number of different verbs for the act of speech for a reason: people have found it useful to pick out particular ways of speaking.

Something You Can Touch

In preparation for beginning on the fourth season, I've been re-watching the earlier seasons of The Wire. I'm about halfway through the second at the monent, which the first time round I liked the most: as this post at The Valve points out, the most obvious categorisation of the seasons is by the institutions they provide an account of, and the disenchanted old-school social democrat in me can't really resist the various tragedies of the dockers union and the Sobotkas in particular; the aristocracy of labour and all that. The Valve post claims - it's not quite a criticism, I think, since part of the point is that the institutional focus provides other goods: value pluralism a-go-go - that characters in The Wire lack interiority, in the sense that individual psychological explanations are never really provided for their behaviour: we never quite know why McNulty is McNulty, in the sense that there is no backstory which tells us how he got to have the in many ways quite familiar collection of vices and virtues he has. Now, I have good Kantian objections to the kind of reductionism those kind of explanations can suppose, but that's another post. What's more interesting is the sense in which it's not quite true, I think, of the Sobotkas, and particularly Frank and Ziggy.

Indeed, The Valve post says of Frank and Ziggy that Ziggy

sees the hopelessness of the situation feelingly, in a way Frank cannot. Instead Frank just keeps going, trying to make it all cohere, until he winds up dead.

but that's just not right. Frank knows how hopeless the situation is. He knows the way which he is trying to save what he cares about it destroys it. He does not want to be doing what he is doing: he repeatedly demands to see The Greek, and has to be bought off with more and more money to pour into the lobbying he cannot help but see is getting nowhere. The way he is satisfied with Ziggy's explanation for being such a publicly useless f*ck-up - they are walking down by the docks, and go back to the bar together after it's given - shows that he thinks it's a perfectly adequate explanation: invoking the virtues, the senses both of community and self-reliance, of working hard with your mates for a decent living, of world both of them can see disappearing makes sense as an excuse for Frank. If it didn't, he could hardly justify his part in smuggling hookers and drugs into his city to himself. Frank's motivations, at least in a generic sense, are pretty transparent to us, even in the absence of an individual psychological backstory: what he cares about, what animates him, is participation in a community of honest labour and the opportunity for others to carry on in that tradition. You don't need a psychological backstory to explain why that might matter, especially when you add Frank's sense of persecution.

Ziggy is different, because, unlike Frank, you can see his past written in his relations with people in the present. He's the union boss's son, and so he has always has a ticket into the formal institution, but everyone knows that's why he has a ticket into the formal institution, and so he never really penetrates any further than that formal acceptance: it's all on suffrance, particularly against a background of fewer and fewer opportunities as de-industrialisation bites. He can't f*ck up, but neither can he succeed, or not there at least. So he tries elsewhere, but because he lacks the skills to see where institutions deny him access or somehow slide past him - he's always had a free pass to the ones he knows best - he f*cks it up. This is why what The Greek says to Frank, urging him to

[s]pend some on a little something you can touch. A new car, a new coat...it’s why we get up in the morning

is so poignant. Frank, like Ziggy, isn't really interested in a little something you can touch. For all that Ziggy is a mess of outrageous conspicuous consumption, when Nicky keeps trying to sweeten him to having lost the dope distribution racket he'd nearly got killed over, he ostentaiously refuses, throwing thousands of dollars away in front of his would-be benefactor. Likewise Frank: he has a shoebox of money under his desk, and he works out the police are onto him because the phone company don't cut him off after three months of not having paid his bill. What both of them want is respect, Ziggy for himself, and Frank for the community he's a part of. Which of course returns me to what I like so much about that season in the first place: the social democratic vision, undeniably exclusionary - it's so very masculine, after all - but nonetheless with a kind of nobility to it, of an aristocracy of labour. What that vision provides, what Frank and Ziggy are worried about the loss of, is not money, not something you can touch: it's what Rawls called the social bases of self-respect, of being understood to be a fully participating member of society, with the powers to realise one's moral agency. That is a good as much as money is, and the Sobotkas illustrate just why.