Quote of the Week:
"It's a little bit like biblical Pharisees, you know, who basically are always trying to undermine Jesus Christ.... You know, it goes on the same way. If they can catch him in something, they can then criticize and the outside groups will go berserk."
- Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), on Fox News, describing the nature of potential Democratic opposition to Supreme Court nominee Judge John G. Roberts Jr
It is forbidden to forbid. Freedom begins by forbidding something: interference with the freedom of others.
Run comrade, the old world is behind you.
The Revolution must take place in men before occurring in things.
The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.
The act institutes the consciousness.
To desire reality is good! To realize one's desires is better.
The thought of tomorrow's enjoyment will never console me for today's boredom.
A single non-revolutionary weekend is infinitely bloodier than a month of permanent revolution.
Re Lord Stevens' assurance that the only way to stop a suicide bomber was to "destroy his brain instantly, utterly", Lenin remarks -
'It is rather salacious. I always detect a secret enjoyment when right-wingers pretending to be tough-minded and realistic describe psychotic violence'.
Absolutely. This co-incidence between hard-nosed realism and perverse enjoyment was nicely captured in an old Not the Nine O’clock News sketch. At the time, there was a public information advert on TV warning car drivers to watch out for motor cycles. The "hard-nosed" guy in the advert, talking about braking distance and so on, asked us to pretend that his fist was the car and his other open hand the motor cycle. He would then smash his fist into his hand with obvious tight-lipped relish. The parodic version asked us to pretend that 'this bag of cellophane filled with marshmallow' is a motor cycle.. this large lump hammer (perhaps a block of concrete?) is your car; now see what happens when your car comes into contact with a motor cycle: he goes berserk, setting about the cellophane bag with the hammer like a crazed lunatic.
Now, I’d like to just elaborate a little on Lenin’s point.
It’s not just that the secret enjoyment of violence can be passed off as mere neutral description, smuggled in under guise of realism or whatever, and therefore disowned. Hard-nosed unsentimental description isn’t merely the alibi for an obscene enjoyment. The clinical neutrality of the description, the uncompromisingly unsentimental tone is itself the very object enjoyed. To talk about murder, death, suffering in purely technical, medical or scientific terms already constitutes a brutalism of its own, a tone so neutral as to be itself a kind of cold violence. Paradoxically, what is enjoyed is the very elimination of affect.
Watching Channel 4's programme on The Upper Class, with its wry look at the remnants of the British aristocracy busy hunting foxes and coursing hares, it came to me that its analysis would have benefited greatly from a familiarity with Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Adorno rightly praised this work as one of the classics of early sociology, and for having a message more damning of the class system it surveys than the author’s own explicit conclusions. Veblen’s leisure class is not the sympathetically reckless aristocracy of The Great Gatsby but a class whose free time is premised on the labour, the exploitation of others. This is also an upper class as barbaric in its leisure pursuits as tonight’s television programme did well to highlight. The British prototype of Veblen's American aristocracy only underlines those inhuman features. Our presenter briefly put himself in the shoes of the upper class revolt against a perceived urban middle-class (Blairite) attack on an ancient ‘way of life’ – though in such a manner that we could only see this ‘way of life’ – fox hunting, hare coursing – for the sadism it is. We even had an aristocratic spokesman quoting Darwin’s ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ – a strange analogy for a class which has risen above the state of nature which is civil society. (Incidentally, back in 1776 Adam Smith could find an analogy between the emerging capitalist system of production and bloodsport, a link it would take another half-century for Engels to make). But Veblen isn’t fooled. He sees the barbarity beneath the veneer of aristocratic respectability in the way few other writers have done. This is a class whose wealth, were it shared out, would meet the needs of many who for want of it will not be living by the end of the year. Divorced from the premise of their wealth the aristocrats look on voyeuristically at the struggle for existence - nature red in tooth and claw - from a comfortable distance, more concerned with the passing of their own way of life.
I have to thank Mark Kaplan for his recent link to a tribute for Herbert Marcuse. Though he was 
celebrated by the New Left of the 1960's, he is someone whose work is largely ignored today. What I always admired about Marcuse was his forthright critique of both Stalinism and Capitalism, his intolerance of liberal tolerance, and his willingness to take political stands. His prose style is that of the old German masters (of course he was a student of Heidegger), his analyses meticulously layed out in classic dialectical fashion. Perhaps most unique was his ability to bring the tools of the early Heidegger (Being and Time) to bear on his readings of Marx and Hegel. Though he is not alone in this attempt (Kojeve, Lacan, Derrida) his ability to transform this influence into specific political insight was remarkable.
Virginia Woolf: though we don't hear much about her in our blogvironment, she's as pertinent as could be... We should all be reading VW. Why? Because what I would argue is her paramount preoccupation - at least in Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, just happens to be (perhaps) the primary issue in our world, the real one, here and now, today...
What preoccupation am I talking about? The preoccupation with not being preoccupied ... Not being preoccupied with the right things. Being distracted by the banal affairs of the day, flowers for the party and the like, while the writing's on the wall, or even up in the sky, just as the shit hits the fan and its all your fault, directly or better indirectly...
A few of my favorite examples... First Dalloway, and then two from TTL...
"The nation must know the universal on which its ethical life is based and before which the
particular vanishes away, and it must therefore know the determinations which underlie its justice and religion… This spiritual self-consciousness is the nation’s supreme achievement… All this is the work of the spirit, which knows how to bring the un-reflected – i.e. the merely factual – to the point of reflecting on itself. It thereby becomes conscious to some degree of the limitation of such determinate things as belief, trust, and custom, so that the consciousness now has reasons for renouncing the latter and the laws which they impose. This is indeed the inevitable result of any search for reasons." Hegel from the Philosophy of World History
Last Friday, the court on which Roberts now serves decided a case that supports the Bush administration's plans to use secretive military tribunals in the war on terror, which have provoked an international outcry from civil libertarians and human rights advocates. The three-judge panel, including Roberts, ruled unanimously that tribunals set up to try terrorism suspects for war crimes, in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, were authorized under federal law. And it found that any rights accorded by the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war did not apply to suspected al-Qaida members or so-called enemy combatants. The two lawyers representing Hamdan in the case called the decision "contrary to 200 years of constitutional law." It was the first major opinion in which Roberts concurred -- and, ironically, could be tested in the Supreme Court during its next term. Quoted from the Salon
In the second part of our interview (first part here), Mr. Miéville discusses his prose style, contemporary comic books, the politics of narrative and his work on international law.
(N.B. See also Bionic Octopus for China's essay on the London bombings.)
..........
JOHN PISTELLI: Where does the question of prose style come in for you? You have a distinctive one, willingness to use jargons, to employ a wide vocabularly based on real or invented sciences as well as a penchant for the “high style” (longer detail-packed sentences, sonorous rhythms) that have earned you comparisons to Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, etc. Could you theorise after the fact about your style?
CHINA MIÉVILLE: There's more than one thing going on there. I'm tempted - as you say, theorising post facto - to think it's a triangulation of two things. On the one hand it's a predilection for the high pulp style that is, intriguingly, shared across genres. Lovecraft of course is its neurotically overblown high priest, but you see the same kind of somewhat overwrought prose in, say, Zane Grey. The fact that 'minimalist' prose in various iterations has been designated the official aesthetic form of acceptable bourgeois fiction, especially its newer hipster versions, is I think the triumph of a rather fatuous notion of a playful text, and it gives a silly but enjoyable radical pulp chic to not playing by those rules. Not that I've any objection to all precise prose, at all - M John Harrison is one of my outstanding literary heroes, and he is a prose scalpel-wielder - but the idea that that is 'how you do it' is absurd. The irony is that this reaction against a certain subset of boojy fiction is _also_ a reaction against a certain tendency in genre. Because a lamentable antipathy to Modernism and formal experimentation has taken some root in sf/f/h. You hear readers say things like 'I'm not bothered so much about the language, I just like to find out what happens.' There's an embedded, mostly untheorised notion that prose should be a window, through which you see, as clearly as possible, that it should be as nearly invisible as possible, to let us get to the content. Not only do I think that's sadly philistine, but it's also, in some sense, a betrayal of what makes fantasy fantasy. That alienation from the everyday can be achieved through form as well as content. So by playing with form like this, you get to link to your pulp heritage as opposed to trying to play by 'mainstream' rules, and paradoxically at the same time distance yourself from the failures of much genre. From Ben Watson, 'Fantasy and Judgement', in Historical Materialism 10, 4: 'The use of a transparent medium for the depiction of 'wonders' and 'ideals' - ... the flat efficiency of the prose of run-of-the-mill romance, horror, porn and fantasy fiction - betrays the fantastic subject-matter.' As not infrequently, I think Ben maybe veers toward the excessively prescriptive, but here I think he's very, very onto something.
Continue reading "'That alienation from the everyday': The China Miéville interview, part two" »
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