Bad luck is such an awful term to pin
To active malice, as the home of art
And beauty, and the soul, is lanced with sin,
Punctured by superstition, torn apart
By things we cannot know, nor hope to win
By ghastly crimes against the human heart.
And yet it seems so preferable to feel
That mankind could not dream up such dark things,
To put it down to chance, lest we reveal
The harshest note a hopeful creature sings,
The crystal maw that bites, the bone that rings.
No prayer will mend the dead, nor time will heal;
As freedom takes flight from its blistered wings
Great bells of grief inexorably peal.
Saturday 14 November 2015
Friday 21 August 2015
Technical Domination and the Efficient Soul
Infinite space and a finite imagination! The irony! Imagination ought precisely to be that which saturates, supersedes, demolishes the bounds of reality. Today this has been reversed, and this is the node of our despair. We cannot think outside of that which is, and thus we cannot progress.
I was reading recently of the role of the image (my reading habits are so eclectic and fleeting that I cannot recall the author - possibly Montaigne, but it may be Freud or Baudrillard - perhaps even the dormant author in my mind, for dreams too often taint that over which they nominally appear to have no control). This author claimed that great visual art must be idealistic in that it shows us a possible future world to which we would otherwise have no access. Great pieces of art are windows looking onto unforeseen utopias. My contention is that the category of art has collapsed today because this progressive, radical edge has been eliminated. Great art is divergent, it creates possibilities, it loosens our shackles but for a moment. Crucially, it opens up the space for radical action. Modern art, however, is convergent - we first assume the arbitrary material state of the world and use this to discover the lost remnants of our imagination, which can then be employed in the efficient functioning of existing power structures. It is almost impossible today to find a piece of art which is not a tepid, failed inversion of capitalistic values. Warhol is the high priest of this philosophy. To be quite fair, however, I recognise that art must forever challenge the status quo, whatever it is. My point is simply that capitalism is so utterly perfect at subverting rebellion and turning it to its own advantage. It is as though the Hegelian dialectic has swallowed itself. Can it really be said that religion survived its treatment by Bosch or Blake in the way that capitalism survives that of Basquiat and Banksy?
And yet I naively hope that the laws of probability require an ultimate endpoint of all oppressive systems, and indeed this seems to be in accordance with any sensible view of economics (of course the problem today is that people seldom are sensible - economists are almost bred to believe that the economy is a divine artifact which cannot be meddled with and which knows no senescence. This is true totalitarianism). It may only be at the end of the lifespan of a system that the imagination can be rekindled, reappropriated, resurrected. It may be only after we have been freed that we may free ourselves.
And yet I naively hope that the laws of probability require an ultimate endpoint of all oppressive systems, and indeed this seems to be in accordance with any sensible view of economics (of course the problem today is that people seldom are sensible - economists are almost bred to believe that the economy is a divine artifact which cannot be meddled with and which knows no senescence. This is true totalitarianism). It may only be at the end of the lifespan of a system that the imagination can be rekindled, reappropriated, resurrected. It may be only after we have been freed that we may free ourselves.
Two memories make themselves known to me. First, I recall a philosophy lesson at school in which one censorious, prudish girl suggested that philosophy is pointless and that we should all devote our time to more fruitful pursuits such as the attempt to cure cancer. In the oppressive smog of stupidity this averment had produced I could not contain my fury. There is no point whatever in living if we do not have the right to question, it is the foundation of our very civilisation. A cancerless life is a healthier one, a safer one. A thoughtless life is no life at all. She desired, as most do in today's world, an animal life, an unthinking eternity of exploitation and false love. Arbitrary everything. The abrogation of the soul. An uncomfortable life and a comfortable death. The bizarre reasoning of the serially deluded.
I am reminded of a passage by Baudrillard in his book America. I am presently rather obsessed by his ideas and, therefore, this post draws heavily on them, and more still on the exceeding beauty of their expression. Such is my chameleonic, plagiaristic writing style. Besides, life itself is a plagiarism. Nothing can be new, just as energy cannot be destroyed. Rather, ideas can only be better-stolen, reformulated in novel ways.
'This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.'
Anyway, the second incident occurred rather later, and I let it pass unchided (unchidden?). The kind of scientific, almost mechanical person who makes these statements is interesting to note. The faces change but the dead soul within is everlasting. In this instance I was being told that it was a great shame that we were born so soon, because in the future we may develop the technology to live forever. What imbecile could desire such a fate? This is the promise of modernity - infinite everything, unceasing juvenescence, a world of smiles. To me, this can only lead to gross upset: artificial intelligence, for example, will likely be the end of the human race. Radicalism in such a world is precisely to renounce the gift, or rather to render it inert and redundant. Such offers could not be made in a better world. They should seem at odds with the very air. I admire the Green Party in their attempts to move us toward a zero-growth economy, for example - it is clear that we cannot ravage the planet indefinitely. The rasping maws of humanity will not cease to snap until everything has been destroyed, and then they shall turn upon their owner. Such is the terror of group logic.
Infinite meaning, infinite commutativity, the endless imposition of arbitrary happiness. Such is man's fate. Today death is dead, and life itself is its own negation. A false welkin of blazing ideology, a spectacle of passivity. Indentured boringness.
Friday 31 July 2015
Scylla, Charybdis and a Dead Lion
For me, the argument against the consumption of meat in developed countries can be summarised as follows: it is fundamentally wrong to kill for one's own enjoyment.
There has recently been much noise about the killing of a lion in Zimbabwe. I felt the need to convey my irritation at the fact that many of those most upset are meat-eaters. They denounce the killing of a lion whilst killing hundreds of animals over their own lifetime. More than this, they cravenly commission these killings, like some kind of deity above - at least this man shot the lion himself. I will argue that, whilst the killing of a lion is of course immoral, it is not appreciably worse than killing an animal which has spent its life in the dank squalor of a factory-farm. I cannot shake my belief that this cognitive dissonance is a result of our anthropocentric view of the world: farm animals are useful - productive - dead, lions are productive alive. Safari trips tend to be less attractive when all the animals are inanimate.
It is, at most, a difference of magnitude, but not of category. In fact, this magnitude argument, founded on the idea that a lion's life is somehow more sacred than a cow's, crumbles when one considers that millions of cows are killed on an annual basis, compared to - who knows - hundreds of lions. The fact is that there is no difference between the elevated individual enjoyment of destroying a real lion over a target dummy than there is in consuming real meat over meat substitutes.
One rather comedic and I must imagine unintentional logical fallacy committed by the Tartuffe defenders of this lion goes as follows (and rather disentangles their web of equivocation): 'What could possibly be wrong with eating meat? The lion did it all the time!' Having made such a statement, and suggesting the equivalence of human and animal moral duty, one is forced into an impasse. The strange conclusion of such a chain of reasoning is as follows: it was absolutely wrong to kill the lion, unless its corpse was consumed. In which case, the death of the lion would have been moral.
I read something by Baudrillard recently, in which he claimed that a woman in a dress is far more sexual than a woman in the nude. Nudity is is almost too nude, too extreme, too perfect, and for Baudrillard this feeds into the idea of hyperreality, the destruction of meaning by its own mass-production. Yet is this not also true of death? We cannot bear the extremity of sheer deadness, it must be tainted with some purfling of life, whether that be in consumption or nostalgic tributes. Perhaps it is believed that to eat the dead lion is to transfer its energy, to deny its death, but to leave it to bacteria and lower creatures is - to human eyes, which regard those beyond its interest as blots of nothingness - to brazenly display it.
This certainly cannot be a sound argument: the illegality, the immorality of taking life cannot be mitigated by individual teleological concerns. We would never accept the murder of a human, however much we had been assured that their corpse nourished the flowers of their grave.
This is not to say that every human can or should renounce meat (but a great deal - morally - ought to). There are many billions so poverty-stricken, so consumed by exploitation that they must eat meat on pain of death, lest they starve. In such cases, as I will explain in the following paragraph, the elevated human faculties of knowing, sympathising and perhaps suffering ought to be considered. Where no alternative to meat is available, it would cause more suffering to starve oneself than to quickly destroy life. But this is a mere anomaly in the developed world.
As an aside, it is interesting to consider the arguments of many vegetarians and vegans. They often claim that humans are not substantively different to animals, and that animal exploitation therefore constitutes an act of 'speciesism' on the part of humans. I do not necessarily dispute the validity of the term 'speciesism' (there may well be some acts of cruelty which stem not from any rational core but simply the salience of species) but such an argument bears dangerous consequences: if we assume that a human life is equal to that of, say, an elephant, then what about a rhinoceros? A cheetah? An eagle? A flamingo? A Komodo dragon? An adder? A tarantula? A house spider? An earwig? An amoeba? An atom? Nothing? My point is that this rapid dégringolade derogates the individual such that he actually has no rights whatever, which jars with the very concept of society. A human has an awareness, a network of friends and so on which do make a human death substantively more calamitous in terms of incurred suffering. Moreover, it would not be terribly unreasonable to be outraged if one were to be moved down the social housing waiting list by a beleaguered amoeba (it is my understanding that such organisms can produce thousands of benefits-sapping children in but an hour).
At the same time, this argument is similarly unsettling. If we accept that all life is qualitatively different on the basis of intelligence, it appears that a great intellect should take absolute precedence over lesser ones. Such an idea will likely disgust any modern mind, including my own, but it is not rationally indefensible. And indeed, it is as a direct consequence of the application of such ideas that much human life has been extinguished. Seemingly, the only resolution to such a problem is to say: all animals are ranked on capacity to suffer, except individual humans. Which again creates the problem of speciesism. It is tempting to believe that this problem can be tackled in chunks, each species morally ranked by average intelligence, but this is completely inappropriate as death is individual. Indeed, an adult pig has an intelligence surpassing that of a human baby. It appears that a solution is challenging.
This bifurcation, this choice between Scylla and Charybdis, is to me the most challenging problem of moral vegetarianism. Perhaps my reasoning is unsound, perhaps there is a clear solution, but I cannot discern it.
There has recently been much noise about the killing of a lion in Zimbabwe. I felt the need to convey my irritation at the fact that many of those most upset are meat-eaters. They denounce the killing of a lion whilst killing hundreds of animals over their own lifetime. More than this, they cravenly commission these killings, like some kind of deity above - at least this man shot the lion himself. I will argue that, whilst the killing of a lion is of course immoral, it is not appreciably worse than killing an animal which has spent its life in the dank squalor of a factory-farm. I cannot shake my belief that this cognitive dissonance is a result of our anthropocentric view of the world: farm animals are useful - productive - dead, lions are productive alive. Safari trips tend to be less attractive when all the animals are inanimate.
It is, at most, a difference of magnitude, but not of category. In fact, this magnitude argument, founded on the idea that a lion's life is somehow more sacred than a cow's, crumbles when one considers that millions of cows are killed on an annual basis, compared to - who knows - hundreds of lions. The fact is that there is no difference between the elevated individual enjoyment of destroying a real lion over a target dummy than there is in consuming real meat over meat substitutes.
One rather comedic and I must imagine unintentional logical fallacy committed by the Tartuffe defenders of this lion goes as follows (and rather disentangles their web of equivocation): 'What could possibly be wrong with eating meat? The lion did it all the time!' Having made such a statement, and suggesting the equivalence of human and animal moral duty, one is forced into an impasse. The strange conclusion of such a chain of reasoning is as follows: it was absolutely wrong to kill the lion, unless its corpse was consumed. In which case, the death of the lion would have been moral.
I read something by Baudrillard recently, in which he claimed that a woman in a dress is far more sexual than a woman in the nude. Nudity is is almost too nude, too extreme, too perfect, and for Baudrillard this feeds into the idea of hyperreality, the destruction of meaning by its own mass-production. Yet is this not also true of death? We cannot bear the extremity of sheer deadness, it must be tainted with some purfling of life, whether that be in consumption or nostalgic tributes. Perhaps it is believed that to eat the dead lion is to transfer its energy, to deny its death, but to leave it to bacteria and lower creatures is - to human eyes, which regard those beyond its interest as blots of nothingness - to brazenly display it.
This certainly cannot be a sound argument: the illegality, the immorality of taking life cannot be mitigated by individual teleological concerns. We would never accept the murder of a human, however much we had been assured that their corpse nourished the flowers of their grave.
This is not to say that every human can or should renounce meat (but a great deal - morally - ought to). There are many billions so poverty-stricken, so consumed by exploitation that they must eat meat on pain of death, lest they starve. In such cases, as I will explain in the following paragraph, the elevated human faculties of knowing, sympathising and perhaps suffering ought to be considered. Where no alternative to meat is available, it would cause more suffering to starve oneself than to quickly destroy life. But this is a mere anomaly in the developed world.
As an aside, it is interesting to consider the arguments of many vegetarians and vegans. They often claim that humans are not substantively different to animals, and that animal exploitation therefore constitutes an act of 'speciesism' on the part of humans. I do not necessarily dispute the validity of the term 'speciesism' (there may well be some acts of cruelty which stem not from any rational core but simply the salience of species) but such an argument bears dangerous consequences: if we assume that a human life is equal to that of, say, an elephant, then what about a rhinoceros? A cheetah? An eagle? A flamingo? A Komodo dragon? An adder? A tarantula? A house spider? An earwig? An amoeba? An atom? Nothing? My point is that this rapid dégringolade derogates the individual such that he actually has no rights whatever, which jars with the very concept of society. A human has an awareness, a network of friends and so on which do make a human death substantively more calamitous in terms of incurred suffering. Moreover, it would not be terribly unreasonable to be outraged if one were to be moved down the social housing waiting list by a beleaguered amoeba (it is my understanding that such organisms can produce thousands of benefits-sapping children in but an hour).
At the same time, this argument is similarly unsettling. If we accept that all life is qualitatively different on the basis of intelligence, it appears that a great intellect should take absolute precedence over lesser ones. Such an idea will likely disgust any modern mind, including my own, but it is not rationally indefensible. And indeed, it is as a direct consequence of the application of such ideas that much human life has been extinguished. Seemingly, the only resolution to such a problem is to say: all animals are ranked on capacity to suffer, except individual humans. Which again creates the problem of speciesism. It is tempting to believe that this problem can be tackled in chunks, each species morally ranked by average intelligence, but this is completely inappropriate as death is individual. Indeed, an adult pig has an intelligence surpassing that of a human baby. It appears that a solution is challenging.
This bifurcation, this choice between Scylla and Charybdis, is to me the most challenging problem of moral vegetarianism. Perhaps my reasoning is unsound, perhaps there is a clear solution, but I cannot discern it.
Thursday 16 July 2015
Surrender
It seems that a large portion of these blog posts is devoted to the lamentation of my own ineptitude, and this mass of text is no exception. The only novelty is that I now know the root, the black root, of my inarticulacy. I no longer wish to write, I wish to be a writer. I want solitude, reclusion, the life of a writer. I cannot sincerely tell myself that I want to produce beauty. This is the peculiar tragedy of modernity: we want instantaneous pleasure, shallow competence, a simulacrum of the thing itself. It is a precarious tangle of desire - were we to apprehend the content, the precondition, for that which we desire, the desire would collapse instantly. The very fact that one pines for fame is the surest mark that one does not warrant it (if indeed anything warrants the gross excess of 'celebrity'). Today we want to have fame in the way that we might have a refrigerator. The idea that we cannot touch and trample everything is an inexorcisable woe.
My incarceration at university has mercifully expired, and what follows will undoubtedly take the form of something far worse. My unsuitability to absolutely any job is such that I see nothing ahead but death and decay. This is not hyperbole: I have spent much of the past year reasoning that taking a 'proactive approach' to the problem of employment was unwise because I would simply be dead beyond university. It has therefore come as rather a shock that I am alive, terribly alive.
People - fools - often console me, 'I think it will all turn out fine for you, you will get a good job in the end,' entirely misinterpreting every monad of my constitution. My fear is precisely this life of respectability, mediocrity, banality. That everything should fall beneath a sea of petty feuds, dull competition, the ache of unimportance. What monster can devote his life to tax returns, bureaucracy, accountancy and such without recourse to suicide? It seems to me that this is entirely preferable to a life of slow despair, a life in which one's powers - whate'er they be - are turned on their host. Depleted by one's own life force, set on by the parasite of one's idealism, this is the most painful suicide of all. And the greatest man builds the most exquisite cage.
My incarceration at university has mercifully expired, and what follows will undoubtedly take the form of something far worse. My unsuitability to absolutely any job is such that I see nothing ahead but death and decay. This is not hyperbole: I have spent much of the past year reasoning that taking a 'proactive approach' to the problem of employment was unwise because I would simply be dead beyond university. It has therefore come as rather a shock that I am alive, terribly alive.
People - fools - often console me, 'I think it will all turn out fine for you, you will get a good job in the end,' entirely misinterpreting every monad of my constitution. My fear is precisely this life of respectability, mediocrity, banality. That everything should fall beneath a sea of petty feuds, dull competition, the ache of unimportance. What monster can devote his life to tax returns, bureaucracy, accountancy and such without recourse to suicide? It seems to me that this is entirely preferable to a life of slow despair, a life in which one's powers - whate'er they be - are turned on their host. Depleted by one's own life force, set on by the parasite of one's idealism, this is the most painful suicide of all. And the greatest man builds the most exquisite cage.
Thursday 22 January 2015
Under the Wall
To play the game, to dance the tune,
To give up for a ghastly boon
The sweetness of the soul which wore
The lineaments of dread before.
They smile yet cannot feel, their hearts
Replaced with facts and trading-charts,
And in their brains, where once was joy,
There's avarice and things that cloy.
They're lied to, they're deceived each day,
They live as though it's fair to say,
'You've but one life, now sell these jeans,
You need not know what all this means.'
And then they wonder why it seems
Mankind today pines, weeps and dreams
But that some facile love should bloom
Out of quick fame, to kill the gloom.
For nothing changes, days pass by,
The promises rotate, things die,
And everywhere, in every face,
Woe rankles in a silent place.
We're chasing will-o-wisps, one fades
And five more come - out in the glades
Of purposeless ambition, where
The dullest soul seems the most fair.
The dome of life explodes, glass falls,
Blood flows in crimson waterfalls,
And finally the cheated see
The smiling face of Trickery.
They've come for me, they've come to take
The only thing they could not break,
You must not let them call again -
Wake up! Wake up, and break the chain!
To give up for a ghastly boon
The sweetness of the soul which wore
The lineaments of dread before.
They smile yet cannot feel, their hearts
Replaced with facts and trading-charts,
And in their brains, where once was joy,
There's avarice and things that cloy.
They're lied to, they're deceived each day,
They live as though it's fair to say,
'You've but one life, now sell these jeans,
You need not know what all this means.'
And then they wonder why it seems
Mankind today pines, weeps and dreams
But that some facile love should bloom
Out of quick fame, to kill the gloom.
For nothing changes, days pass by,
The promises rotate, things die,
And everywhere, in every face,
Woe rankles in a silent place.
We're chasing will-o-wisps, one fades
And five more come - out in the glades
Of purposeless ambition, where
The dullest soul seems the most fair.
The dome of life explodes, glass falls,
Blood flows in crimson waterfalls,
And finally the cheated see
The smiling face of Trickery.
They've come for me, they've come to take
The only thing they could not break,
You must not let them call again -
Wake up! Wake up, and break the chain!
Wednesday 14 January 2015
Fragment on Politics
A year or so ago I fancied a career in writing, I entertained gross notions of immense delusion by which I would transcend the dull shells we inhabit. Yet I am no longer a believer, and why should I be? It is not just a matter of ability but appetite. I realise that I used to write with no expectations, I used to really channel my innermost spirit without wishing to mask it in verbosity. Now I refrain from writing lest I produce some abomination. Yet the following was a necessary creation, it rankled with me.
I like to tell myself that, beneath a coarse veneer of intolerance, of cold-heartedness and spite, I harbour some humanity, some hope, some idealism. Yet I venture still further and find but another level of blight. This world is so unbelievably, inconceivably broken as to be almost beyond repair. I used to enjoy writing of our collective plight, but it now merely depresses me. I have been made to understand why young writers are the real Writers, the real Poets of the world. They recognise the hideous nature of this place, yet they do it wide-eyed and hopeful. They bear a kind of indomitable hubris - yet hubris without the hubris. It is something unique. They simultaneously see themselves as fit to assay the world whilst maintaining that we are all dirt, even themselves. The old, they bear real hubris, a real vested interest in sustaining a vile state of affairs. The young have a similar arrogance, but it is a sincere arrogance for which I do not believe a word exists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)