Every age gets the art it deserves

When the Machine Age gears up to destroy a whole generation of men tethered to machines and poverty in Europe, it gets Dada, Max Ernst and Otto Dix, and Pierrot Lunaire.

Perspectives change; they become radicalised. So where Goya depicted even something evil - a witches' sabbath, with Satan to boot - using a colour scheme which now would trick us into believing that beauty = sympathy, the Generation of 1918 reduced the splendour of a landscape or the heroism of war into something suspicious and sinister:



The glories of Classicism from the early Industrial Revolution become nothing more than the glories of the class whose lust for honour and glory and wealth took the peasant and incarcerated him in the factory, and then sent him off to fight a war from which few of his number returned. Beauty becomes suspicion; form becomes function. 



The ideals of the age are stripped away and the bare reality is exaggerated. Schinkel's classicism gives way to the astringent Bauhaus.

It took over one hundred years of middle-class liberalism (1789-1918) to make the transition from Romanticism to 'pure' Modernism; from the early revolutionary promise of the French Revolution, which provided so much hope to Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, and Hegel and Hoelderlin in Germany, to the disillusionment of the first of the Western 'Peloponnesian' Wars 1914-1918. Gyorgy Lukacs referred to this as the transtion of the bourgeois from its heroic period to its unheroic period in his 1934 essay on Hoelderlin - from the Bastille to Bernard Baruch, in our view.

How does one then characterise the post-Cold War age? Cursorily, it feels like a later development of seeds already sown in earlier ages. All political life is subordinated to the management of the economy (cf. global sovereign debt crisis and austerity) - as in the Weimar Republic; high finance is ubiquitous and troublesome, as in President Jackson's age; globalisation proceeds apace (forseen by Marx in part one of his German Ideology); cultural cynicism is as strong as after the Great War; democracy and the problem of the citizen unleashed by Bastille is more widely spread; technology is as unavoidable as when the Luddites smashed their first machines in England.

Intensification and exhaustion perhaps characterise our age.

Burning Pyre's next post will test the proposition that 'every age gets the art it deserves' and attempt to falsify its conviction that our age - call it what you will - is an intensification of long-lived trends and is as a result exhausted.

All religions perish through the belief in morality

Thus wrote Nietzsche in a notebook of 1885.

When the Church of England synod recently voted against women bishops, the resulting criticism proves Nietzsche's observation that morality (a system of values in which 'good' and 'bad' are determined by shame, guilt and control) kills religion (a set of values in which 'good' and 'bad' derive almost wholly from a caste of self-confident and self-satisfied peers in contrast to their competitors). There is no doubt that religion is dying - from the left, for want of morality; from the right, for want of self-belief.

Skyfall: a short review

When sat before a Parliamentary Select Committee - accused of wilful disregard for the lives of her agents lost for her neglect - M reads from Tennyson's Ulysses, a poem once used to sell UBS products. And whilst Skyfall film sells us Adidas, Heineken, Omega and Jaguar, it does so no more than Friday Night with Jonathan Ross or Alan Carr Chatty Man promotes a book or a record - and certainly no more than almost any mainstream American film of the last 85 years  - the point being the poem itself. Why? Because the Bond franchise is made by its villains. In 50 years there has not been one Bond to match the supple plots of Hitchcock or Wilder - or even an attempt. Spies, femmes fatale, the shady extra-judicial world of international politics: the subject matter fecundly waits for a sophisticated treatment - and yet we have Moonraker.



Instead, Bond is used to gaze at the evil in the world. Russia. Voodoo. Germans. The media. And sometimes: within.

The villain of Skyfall is Bardem's Silva. He grins laciviously at Bond, has a prosthetic bridge and moves from vintage Scotch to murder as coolly as if he were passing between rooms in a house for the same reason that Von Rothbart jumps around the stage like a tweaker in Swan Lake or Richard III is depicted with a hunchback: evil is disharmonious. It is the devil's work.

But for his disharmony, Silva is just Bond on a left-forked path.


But he is the enemy within. That's why the film is set in London, why he dresses as a bobby - that almost sacred, usually gunless beat cop - why he hacks at will into Britain's most sophisticated computer system. The danger within, the terror within - be vigilant, this film whispers, for just as Russia was yesterday's evil, that is today's evil.

Whilst Skyfall does not transcend The Bond Genre; whilst it revels in a kind of Saxon page-as-to-Norman  knight patriotism of fealty to the Establishment (and Tennyson was Poet Laureate), it is saved by Silva.
If he were offered the opportunity to read a poem - which perhaps he should have, as his life is dedicated in a sense to M - it would be ee cummings, Mayakovsky or Pound. Concrete; difficult or self-defeating to recite; sublime; tragic.

Arrested for... well, just read it

Here.

Western cognitive dissonance

Classic sample from the BBC here. The dialectic runs as follows:

China is:

- the world's oldest extant state (dating back to at least 200BC);
- the fastest growing economy in the world now;

These are facts. But China is also very monocultural (this is a fact), and that is its greatest weakness (this is a value judgment).

That the former results from the latter is ruled out (presumably) as a result of the prevailing faith in mankind, underpinned by the political doctrine that we have 'strength through diversity.' Whoever believes that we have overcome religion is as deluded as this piece of reasoning. It is likely that we will never transcend faith; will never want to transcend faith. But let's not congratulate ourselves for going beyond religious faith. Secular faith is no better.

The brain is a funny thing. What did Celine say? That's right, he pissed on 'em:

‘The head is a kind of factory that doesn’t run exactly the way you’d like… imagine… two thousand billion neurons… all a complete mystery… where does that get you?... neurons left to their own resources! The slightest attack, your head goes haywire, you can’t pin down a single idea… you’re ashamed of yourself.’

Political Olympics: round 2

Jonathan Agnew's umbrella confiscated by Olympic brand police

David Cheeseman, a cameraman working for the BBC at Lords yesterday [30 July], also tweeted that a "LOCOG brand protection lady" had stuck black tape over the names "Canon", "Sony" and "Satchler" on his equipment because they were not official sponsors. 

Yesterday:

German rower sent home because her lover is in an un-PC [but not illegal] far right group

Chinks in the armour

Zambian miners kill Chinese manager during pay protest, reports the BBC.

China's strategy in Africa has been subtle: exploit the African's mistrust of their former colonial masters in Europe by presenting them with an unmilitarised alternative form of developing the continent whilst extracting key resources for the motherland and sending Chinese managers to factories and mines to ensure that the model runs smoothly.

Not so smoothly, it turns out.

Nevertheless, China is playing the long game, suffering short-term losses absorbed within its huge capacity as it buys up operations left fallow by Western firms who focus unreasonable quantities of effort on unreasonably short-term strategies of portfolio optimisation.

Watch this space: resource control was, is and ever will be the only purpose of geopolitics.

Political Olympics: twitter antics

Bad tweet saw Greek OC drop athelete...

Despite her apology, pressure continued to mount for Papahristou to be removed from the Greek Olympic team

...

‘It’s the same as violating fair play,’ [head of Greece’s Olympic mission] told a Greek television station.

How, when it had nothing whatsoever to do with the sport with which she is involved, or any sport for that matter?

 ...another bad tweet sees Swiss athlete sent home

In a statement, Gian Gilli, the head of the Swiss Olympic delegation, said that Morganella, 23, had “said something insulting and discriminatory” about the South Korean soccer team. 
 ...
In a separate statement, Morganella said that he had “made a huge mistake” by sending the Twitter message after the game and that he was “truly sorry for the people in South Korea, for footballers, but also for the Swiss delegation and the Swiss football in general.”  


MP in the shit with the PM for complaining about the opening ceremony


The worst:

Hunt for Tom Daley Twitter troll: seaside police raid nets suspect, 17

A 17 year old boy tweets that an athelete has let down his father. I feel for the athlete (his dad died last year), but should this really be an arrestable offence? The worst thing is, people actually felt the need to report the comments to the police.

LIBORgate: less than full disclosure?

Diamond accused of not being fully open with MPs walks with a now-confirmed £2m severance package.

Link.

He'll walk; Tucker'll walk - they always do. When complete global financial collapse is the alternative to fraud, the law will turn into a pragmatist. This is clear from the fact that countless subprime loans were linked to LIBOR, which is to say that the rate of interest at which incredibly risky borrowers borrowed (the so-called NINJA loans - no income, no job, (no) assets. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING?) was linked directly to the rate at which banks received short loans from other banks in order to lend. It was a patriotic act to fudge LIBOR and continue the illusion that it was safe for banks to lend short to each other (rather than knowingly pass around an HIV-infected needle at a bag and spoon party). patriotic to capital and Smithsian self-interest, that is.

LIBORgate: Diamond Bob polishes himself off

faces grilling of MPs. Senior Bank of England official knew about the scandal.

Let's see how far they take the same line as Murdoch and get away with it: "I didn't know about LIBOR manipulation by people in my division." Didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg. Some consistency please, people! The law is the law!

Link.

LIBORgate

Let's start with a fundamental truth: rigging votes is less important than rigging money. When a vote is rigged, you end up with a candidate very slightly different from the one that won the most votes. When money is rigged - by banks manipulating the rate at which they will lend to each other - you set yourself up for a massive redistribution of wealth. It is the selfsame systemic risk problem that caused the Credit Crunch. The money Barclays itself would have made on manipulating the rate is like the tiny circumference of a thrown stone as it breaks through the surface of a calm pond; it is dwarfed by the ripples which emanate from the source of the impact. Five years' worth of manipulated LIBOR is the latest storm in managed capitalism, the main problem of which is not corruption or venality - for they exist in all walks of life and to a degree never smaller in history - but scale. The ability of single events to spiral out of control and destroy not just banks but countries is the ineluctable causal principle of our networked society.

Politics and football

Anyone watching the Germany-Italy game was treated ere the kick-off to two declarations of faith, one by each captain, on the subject of respect and diversity. Only the auto-da-fe - perhaps publicly embarrassing someone who tweeted about "fags" when drunk or a foolhardy consumer facebooking  "the paki at the corner shop ripped me off again!" - is still missing from the melding of football and politico-religion.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott film): a review

Director Ridley Scott is a Geordie (well, basically) and as a Geordie, he's an Englishman. That means his idealism, that is: his ability to think about the non-material origins of life, is non-existent. Decades before Darwin matched the empirical evidence to Wallace's thinking and invented evolution, Napoleon called Britain a nation of shopkeepers, quoting Scotsman Adam Smith but twisting it in order to make fun of Britain's lack of idealism and the presumed effect of this paucity upon their fighting spirit. Le petit corporal was to be proved wrong in Iberia and Belgium, but the stubbornness with which the British have resisted all forms of idealism - from Hegel and Marx to Virchow's vitalism to fascism to Spengler- proved him correct off the field. Where a thing can't be measured, it isn't real in Britain. When one of our greatest minds kicks a rock and presumes that that refutes all idealism, that's when you know this sceptred isle sides with the bleeding obvious.

Alien, the film of which Prometheus is prequel, was a decent action film made superb by the outpourings disembogued from the perverted mind of HR Geiger, an aesthetic futurologist famous also for his Penis Landscape which landed Jello Biafra in trouble in the 80s. Prometheus attempts to go deeper than the homocidal shiny black exoskeleton of the xenomorph so familiar and beloved of movie fans and asks How did it come to be? within the larger question how did we (man) come to be?

The title of the film is a not-subtle clue to the moral dimension of the story of the mission of the spaceship Prometheus, a sparsely-crewed vessel travelling through space to a planet outside of our solar system to where all the prehistoric clues of primitive man on earth point tantalisingly and cypherously towards the fact behind creation myth. When you try to get knowledge that is beyond your ken, you will be burnt (or rather, chained to a rock in the Caucasus with adamantine bonds and have your regenerating liver pecked out by vultures). Where the crime of the Prometheus of Antique religion was the Titan's theft of the secret of fire from the Gods and his transmitting it to man, the crime of the crew of the eponymous spaceship of Scott's film is the attempt to 'steal' the knowledge of our origins through science. It's a theme Heidegger would have approved of. But that is where the philosophical gravitas begins and ends. It is a maguffin, a ponderous, oppilating set-up to the alien-based action, which is the 'burning' of the aforesaid moral.

The writers of Prometheus will have us believe that aliens, who look like hypertrophied marble statues of Greek gods, created man, promulgating every nebulous, mythological-fantastical guff ever uttered about the origins of man and technology on earth. Why they created man, we don't know. I suppose aliens is easier to believe than chance, and chance more than some other more veiled reason.

That Prometheus takes this line is unsurprising - because this is a prequel to Alien, let's be realistic -  but to use it as the plot and theme of the film betrays the English origins of its creator. What do I mean? I mean that the fact of aliens creating us doesn't answer anything, and it is the most tantalising yet inelegant set-up to monster action that I have ever seen. One of the characters in the film pursues the tantalising line and asks, "So where did they come from?" Scott makes no serious attempt to discuss or even to reiterate this excellent question. Prometheus fails to be the philosophical film it sort of hints that it wants to be and instead resiles to macerate in the drool-juice of its own gormless pretension.

The action scenes are plausible, the tension decent (the classic 'monster-tracker' beepers of the first Alien films are retranslated as a more sophisticated piece of holographic kit, but they're still there) and Fassbender is good as this instalment's inevitable is-he-good-or-bad android.
This:

Isn't this:

Lionel Asbo: A story of England

The plot of Amis's latest sounds suspiciously like Barnaby Barford's artwork-narrative Big Win, reviewed here in April. Can anyone comment?

Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil: a review

About a year ago I bought a house with my girlfriend - our first - and we decided to grow the garden from scratch. It was a new build, so the jardin was a clay mess, a crenellated turbid 'scape which would have furnished Otto Dix with enough material to fill in the blanks in his Alzheimered dotage.
This is what I did: I got rid of the detritus, the torn texile swatches of rubble-sacks, nails, breeze-blocks, bizarre twisted metal that looked as if it were from some autochthonous steampunk civilisation lost to history; I sowed out the stones and the rubble from the thinnest layer of soil-dust; I broke down the clay with my spade; I flattened out the craters from where the rubbish had been picked; I put down compost and sharp sand and fertiliser and grass seed; and - life came. Grass and earthworms and horrendous knotgrass and thistles and harlequin ladybirds ventured from the reclaimed wilderness. But it is my garden and I am happy.
I am Isak, forger in the wilderness, a rugged survivalist, a primitive ignorant of money and clock-time, but sympathetic to nature's time, the more fundamental time of organic life, regarding the changing seasons as my calendar and wrist-watch, completely attuned to the needs of the belly and the body, to man in his natural state, to the growth of the soil.

Yes, we at Burning Pyre also don't believe that soil grows, but what the fuck: Hamsun's book won him the Nobel Prize three years after its publication in 1917, back when the Prize was a Scandinavian gentlemen's club and before the word 'post-colonial' was coined.

By 1920, Hamsun had already written a swath of modernist texts, the most famous of which is Hunger, a book widely read today and arguably the bridge between dark Russian psychologism of the 19th century and the urban alienation of the 20th century. Like one of those writers, Celine, was later to do, Hamsun toured the US. To judge from Growth of the Soil, what he learned was hatred of money and love of the countryside.

So Hamsun wrote a novel about man in his totally natural, ahistorical state, what Spengler meant when he referred to the prehistoric skirmishes of the Cherusci or the Wolofs as a fight between ant colonies. History does not begin until there is a written chronicle; it falls away where there is no need for one. This is the ahistorical world of Isak.

- Some soil, yesterday

Of course, this doesn't mean that the novel is without events. Like the earth, the story moves through its own seasons, beginning with a preface redolent of 'spring', in which Hamsun explains how Isak created a simple dwelling and began to live off the land. Through Isak's determination and his own labour, he builds instead of mud a house of wood, buys livestock and settles down with a female who wanders onto his land, a woman called Inger, afflicted with a hare lip, but a modest companion and a hard worker.

Together, Isak and Inger start a family and all is fine until Inger births a daughter with a cleft palate. In true Aktion T4 style, she strangles it. In Hollywood, this would be the real opening of the story, the point at which the city-dwelling audience, torpid but unsated by an infinity of pleasures, ever-envious of what everyone else has, achieves the satisfaction it had been waiting for when it bites into the delicious apple-shaped schadenfreude of trouble in rural paradise. In Hamsun, Inger's cruel act is the hard fact of human nature that people are driven by desperation to do terrible things.

The murder is a doorway to the real theme of the novel, one close to Hamsun's heart and one increasingly difficult to grasp in the ever-urbanising West of the 21st century. Inger is imprisoned and returns home after a lengthy spell in the city prison, miles and worlds away from the remote rural setting of her Isak and her sons, with her cleft lip corrected, a daughter and, most crucially, a new Weltanschauung. Gone is the demure inverted-ingenue Inger, who displays the features of Hamsun's ahistorical tapestry of 'spring'; in her place is someone else, someone different - a self-conscious Inger, a world-weary, jaded Inger, a physically improved but morally degraded Inger, who feels herself above the work she had performed before she was incarcerated.It takes an act of gentle physical persuasion from Isak to set her back in her place with him. Inger withdraws and finds religion, but also re-assesses her values and falls in love again with Isak, the simple, plain master of the wilderness now called Sellenra. Strangers, opportunists come and go; the seasons metaphorically embedded in the narrative (Struggle - spring; enjoyment of fruits of labour - summer; upset - autumn; and the dark night of the soul - winter) cycle about like spokes on the wheel of Hamsun's narrative. What remains after everything is the strength of the growth of the soil - the power of land and toil.

Hamsun's tone, his on-and-off use of the present tense, evokes oral storytelling, the primary art of the ancient (pre-classical) Greeks and Celts and the timeless conduit of fables and proverbs. As a tale of rustic folk and the homestead it is as close as the late art of the West comes to a prose Hesiod. The first translator of the book, W Worster, said that 'a more objective work of fiction it would be hard to find.' The matter-of-factness of Hamsun's narrator, his description of the characters' feelings couched in conversational speculations but never demeaning them, pointed to a different kind of fate for Western literature, one which is echoed in the flatness of his partial-contemporary Hemingway's prose, but which never gathered enough pace to attack the muggy but creative psychologism of Joyce, the synaesthesia of Dos Passos and the ornate factual-fictional reminiscences of Proust. Growth of the Soil is anti-Impressionist and anti-Expressionist. It is the literary equivalent of Henri Rousseau, and therefore late in the unified theory of Western art, but timely nevertheless. With the bloodiest, most destructive war in history finished just over a year before the Nobel Committee's decision to award a novel so hostile to the idea of the city and its money and machines, it is no surprise that this point would have been considered insensitive if not pernicious to a wounded Europe's need to look to idyllic alternatives.

Hamsun's skepticism about the war and civilisation later led him to sympathise with Germany over England, with the tenets of Blood & Soil over the dogma of Capital. He refused to repent after the second war. His books remain in print and widely translated, such is the force of his vision.

Hamsun's Nobel acceptance speech:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1920/hamsun-speech.html

http://www.hamsun.dk/uk/

Romanzo Criminale: La Serie 1 – a review

To judge from the credits alone - brief glimpses of shades-wearing men having seedy conversations; shots of wads of lira; guns - RC is either a shitty cheesy crime drama set in the 70s in the vein of the Professionals, or a cool Goodfellas-style fast-paced anthropological study of Italian crime in Italy. Even the promo photo looks shit. Happily, this story of the real-life Banda della Magliana is neither; fortuitously, it is the greatest TV programme maybe ever.

It is a bildungsroman of a gang, centring on its leader, small-time hood Lebanese, who lives in a small caravan by the Tiber. Inevitably, he forges alliances with local hoods and runs risks with dogged determination as they come up against better-connected foes and the sinister Camorra. So far so Scarface. But we who know little about the Banda in advance of its screening are never given the sense that their rise to power will be inevitable in the same sense as a Hollywood gangster epic. Limited by their running time, the big screen bildungsroman defaults to vignettes, presenting the trajectory of character in a single unvarying gradient, always seeming like an abridged biography retold by an omniscient narrator. Romanzo Criminale's format, whilst conforming to type with its 12 intriguing introductions and 12 cliff-hanger endings, allows many twists and set-backs and seems much closer to a geniune thriller than a morality tale, which is effectively what Scarface, Goodfellas, et al. are. In fact, the gang's transition from small-time hoodlumry to the big stage establishes once and for all supremacy of the novel and the TV series over story, film and stage in matters of exposition.

Most interesting is the fact that RC is set during Italy's anno di piombi. This is the most triumphant detail in the series. The historical gravitas of Italy's torrid recent past elevates Criminale way, way above run-of-the-mill crime dramas and makes HBO centrepieces like the Sopranos look like a dreary soap-opera and Life on Mars like the fantasy it is (people with no historical sense have compared it to both). The series begins like the flashbacks in Godfather Part 2 and hits another level when Aldo Moro is kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It is the crucially-important historical backdrop which makes the Italian state itself - in the form of the shady secret service, the identity of whose acolytes we see interspersed throughout the series, is only very slowly revealed - complicit in breaking the rule of law in exactly the same way as the Banda did. They are morally equivalent, these murdering thieves from the poor part of Rome and the security service, the writers tell us. The facts bear out the claim.

BP wasn’t alive to experience the 1970s in Italy, so we will refrain from posturing about its historical authenticity, but it looks and feels like a different, grubbier, less technologically sophisticated era and one familiar from archive footage. We know that the 1970s in Western Europe saw serious threats to the established order in the form of Communism, trade unionism, terrorism (Red, Black and anti-colonial) and, perhaps most of all, the Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis of 1973. The piece of the pie seemed to get smaller across the West. A new, grubbier realism set in after the optimism of the 60s. It even saturated Hollywood. Watergate happened. Baader-Meinhof were running crazy across West Germany. The British army were shooting civilians in Ulster. Men were dressing up as women and pretending to be space aliens with 1950s’ licks. The US pulled out of ‘Nam, unable to defeat a determined army of peasants with AKs. Were the liberal values of the West falling apart? Was Communism going to take over?

The Years of Lead as presented in Criminale show the audience that Italy, far from being the land of fashion, pasta and football familiar to English-speaking contemporaries, was - is - an intensely political nation divided, like much of Europe, into three camps by its reaction to Anglo-capitalism. Firstly, the left, the Red Brigades and Anarchists, who kidnapped and murdered the Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro in 1978 (we are given a glimpse of this through Inspector Scaiola's relationship with his Red sister); then the right, the fascists and Mussolini revivalists, whom we see when the fascist adventurer Nero (brilliantly played by an Iggy Pop lookalike) needs someone to launder his money; and finally, the centre, the dominant party of acquiescent capitalists after the fall of Mussolini, typified by Berlusconi. It is in the centre where the Banda (in spite of its links to NAR) and their nemesis Inspector Scaiola exist. The Banda believe in money, Scaiola in reason, together the two values uniting the centre faction: capital and law, the means of enforcing capital. By contrast, the secret service seem like out-of-control puppet masters, unsure which marionette to play with more. According to the producers, they played the Banda over Scaiola and the Right over the Left. But they don’t want more money and, as far as we can tell, they don’t want a second Duce.

The dichotomy between rifht and left resolved itself and the Years of Lead ended, but not before 85 people were blown up in Bologna. So, what of the era hinted at by the end of the first series of Romanzo? Governments calmed down, or got better at covering themselves up. The populace was tired of terrorism and pacified by the financial boom of the 1980s. Liberal markets triumphed across most of the world in 1991; Kojeve’s end of history thesis came to fruition. Francis Fukuyama updated it with an audacious piece of backwards clairvoyance. Markets opened up to freer trade. Governments trusted each other to be more predictable than in the 70s and real political choice between Red, Black and Centre was replaced with consumer choice. Companies, too, reacting to legislation to better secure national income, sought to make revenues more predictable, employing Black-Scholes and the personal computer to master the future and conquer risk (suggested further reading: Galbraith’s Affluent Society).

We live in a world a start-up Banda would have dreamed of – the approval and promotion of crass materialism, the ability to get-rich-quick and the chaos of globalisation as a smoke screen for their underworld activity. If the NAR or the CPI had got into power, they would have been toast.

More on the Banda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_della_Magliana

Change.org: coming to a protest near you, UK

Link.

Commentators will be quick to assess the importance and the magnificence of an online petition system which can – and has – drummed up support for initiatives as diverse as opposing Bank of America, obtaining support from Apple for its Chinese workforce and ensuring that lynchmob justice prevails in the bizarre Trayvon Martin case.



Yes, the selfsame commentators who laud the arrival of the phenomenon on these shores I doubt will like to see the millions of signatures appended to populist petitions for member states to quit the EU (now inevitable), for death sentences to be handed out to child killers and for immigration to be stopped dead.


Democracy – genuine democracy, i.e., populism – is a rollercoaster and must not be confused with our current staid system of politics. I’m talking about managed democracy, with its quinquennially-elected professional politicians, who are under no obligation to vote how their constituents want them to, which is like a centrally-planned version of democracy in a similar way that ‘managerial capitalism’is the centrally-planned version of entrepreneurial capitalism.
 
As the internet is a threat to managerial capitalism, so change.org could be a threat to managed democracy.



But if they think they can waltz into China they’ve another thing coming.

The New Arcades Project

Burning Pyre is sick of the serviette badinage which passes for trench warfare between modern media talking heads. We’ve read of the time when men would beat and shoot each other to death over their opinions, viz. 1919:

 

What are we trying to say, ever so clumsily? That the cultural commentator and artist should stop whispering behind his napkin, embarrassed by a ballsy opinion, and say something real.

The New Arcades Project is an attempt to understand – hell: appreciate – art, politics, philosophy, history, economics, etc, etc, within a fragmented narrative context which is not history, but nevertheless seems like history. The rise of new media means that a new understanding can be developed which is not based in the art gallery or in the venerable book (which we continue to venerate, Amazon’s space-saving toy be damned) and, thanks to its brevity, need not be monotonically classicist or Marxist or fascist or capitalist or –ist at all. It can interweave competing, fragmented narratives to present a mosaic-like picture of events. It is the theory of history for an over-intellectualised, over-stimulated, over-fed generation who do not know what war or political rioting is, but who wish to understand the past more viscerally and without regard to political correctness or narrative structure than a million History Channel reconstructions, based on a phenomenological bootstrapping of personal experience to general, 'public' experience.

What the fuck does this mean?

We all remember the time, however distantly, a great record was released; an artwork seized the headlines; a terrorist event gripped our attention and our pity; a magnificent moment which was greater than our own personal agendas and felt, yes, like the Zeitgeist itself! This is the New Arcades Project.

Glam decadence: 1970s Britain and fin-de-siecle Paris

This is a continuation of our retronauting back to the 70s with Bernhard’s Correction (’75), Eno’s Ambient 1 (’78) with the glam roots of the decade.

This is what really kicked it off:

Men wearing makeup? Do well to note that this is what life in the early 70s was like:

While glam rock just looks old-fashioned and silly to most people now, underlying its outward daftness is the desire not even twenty years after the creation of rock n roll to lionise stardom and to play with the concept of it. It wasn’t enough simply to be the star, to play the music, to sell out Shea Stadium – you had to differentiate yourself from the ordinary people and give vent to their (supposedly) subconscious desires to break free and live as if you had the money to do it. Like this:

So glam was born, the next rebellion of the slightly-younger of the same generation (Bolan and Bowie were only 7 years younger than Lennon). T-Rex were the first and best and Bolan even did the courtesy of dying before he was thirty, cementing his legend as the leader of his pack, but Ziggy Stardust is the real hero of glam rock, and his roots are much, much older than rock n roll.

The writers J-K Husymans, Octave Mirbeau and Wilde had long satirised the hedonistic bent of fin-de-siècle France and Victorian Britain; glam was a recrudescence of this kind of flared-cuff-and-top-hats approach to aesthetics and desire, indulging as far as possible in all the bad taste glitter and glitz that could be found in a still-industrial Britain. Bowie/ Ziggy’s Rock n Roll Suicide even incorporated the same moral resolution that Wilde adopted in The Portrait of Dorian Gray - a debauched Ziggy is torn to pieces by his fans - although admittedly Jones/Bowie/Ziggy’s influence was a melange inspired by the youthful demise of Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix. And the Americans landing on the moon. And Vince Taylor.

That glam was a revival of older music there can be no doubt: listen to the blues and 50s rock n roll riffs in T-Rex, cribbed from the States and cranked up to 10, and songs like Cadillac and Thunderwing (these aren’t British cars), they’re all poses (Bolan couldn’t even drive). The smooth ballading of Ziggy, cribbed from Sinatra and the 60s (and the 30s’ Wizard of Oz, in the case of Starman) and his rockers, which sound like Hendrix wrapped in foil and without the wah-wah and fuzzbox pyrotechnics, hark back to a simpler, purer era, stripped down to an essence bottled in prior decades.

The point here isn’t that pop will eat itself; glam was original, for all its references to aesthetic history. It’s that it was the first successful ‘heroising’ sub-genre of music, to permit a coinage. The rock n roll star as hero, as alien. Recall Baudelaire’s casting the role of poet in L’Albatross from the Flowers of Evil:

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.

Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.


That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

The poet as self-conscious outsider, raised above the common mass by his idealism and his sensitivity, alienated by the crude materialism of an increasingly affluent everyday life (the ahistorical amongst our readers will be shocked to read that pockets of Western Europeans in the 1860s thought their civilisation 'too affluent' prior to mass electrification, pre-radio, pre-TV, pre-Space Invaders, pre-Xbox, pre-Iphone, pre-Google glasses, but there it is). The sidereal hero of Bowie’s Starman, who instructs Ziggy to spread the message of love and hope on earth, is glam rock's classic exemplar. It is not the same kind of peace and love spread in the 60s, by a generation who thought they were changing the world:

Admittedly, Jim Morrison was of the same ilk, and the influence of Rimbaud and the Imagists is less oblique in his lyrics than in glam. The Doors were literary, to be sure, but they differ ideologically from glam in that Morrison wasn't interested in the idea of the rock star; he was interested in the idea of the mage, the writer and the dark poet, but happened to be a rock star in a rock band.

The colour TV - introduced into Britain in 1967- helped glam's cause immensely, as it had the psychedelic movement. Ziggy Stardust in monochrome would have looked like a bird shat on him, like a bad character from Dr Who; that would confuse the public, not enrage and inspire it:

Within a year, Roxy Music's Brian Eno had chinned Bowie sonically with Here Come the Warm Jets, at times redolent of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and their Carollian whimsy, in fact awash with clues about the aural horizon and the invention of ambient music (see previous posts). But Ziggy played guitar, and the kids saw it – and that’s what counted, in this decade of oil crises, failure of the greatest Western power to bring down a nation of peasant-communists and growing social unrest. Tune in, turn on and drop out had failed, apparently stabbed to death at Altamont in December '69 and vapourised in Britain by increasingly virulent bombings by the IRA. The communal hippy dream had faded; the decadent dream of glamour rock n roll heroism is what replaced it. Baudelaire would have approved.

Thomas Bernard's Correction: a review

 

1931-1989

 

He looked a bit like James May, but Bernhard wrote dark shit nothing to do with cars or Jeremy Clarkson.

This novel, two long paragraphs recounting the work, life and death of a scientist-writer-architect-philosopher loosely based on Wittgenstein and written in 1975, is firmly within the dark (post)modernist wave of post-WWII art; a quintessentially unfilmable novel which escapes into the dark interstices where the writer melts into his subject matter as if he himself were a palimpsest and then breaches the overlay - be it reminiscences of youth or Roithamer's recondite script on his life, his family, the sister whom he loved and the mysterious edifice, the Cone - and surfaces again to remind us that this is a novel with an apparently reliable narrator.

The subject of the story is Roithamer. The nameless narrator and Hoeller, the childhood friend in whose garret Roithamer found the courage to complete the Cone, are merely wallpaper, Hoeller interesting wallpaper, whose pleasure is to stuff birds late at night in his workshop - or is it? Roithamer is no pointy-headed mentalist-genius in the Hollywood style (Shine, A Beautiful Mind, Pollock), but a man whose genius we are told to accept through his accomplishing the apparently impossible feat of building a cone-shaped structure in the middle of the Kobernausser Forest. And accept it we do, because - there is nothing else to grasp in this novel.

If the narrator is a palimpsest, ever abrading his will from the narrative, then Roithamer is a vessel for Bernhard's reflections on inevitability.

Napoleon said that the ancient concept of fate is replaced in the modern era with policy. Bernhard reminds us here that policy is determined fatefully - by quirks (by being born in Altensam), by predispositions (to over-analyse), by family ('the Erdfing woman'); that is, inescapably.



So far so bleak. Possibly more popular, but not as funny as Celine (but then Bernhard wasn't right-wing), Bernhard falls into the trap of all classically depressed/ dark artists - if he ever played a practical joke in his life his credibility would be over, instantly. Think Beckett (all turtle necks and fierce stares from that vulture-like visage), Robert Smith, Van Gogh, Schiele, etc., po-faced artists (and others) who, if they ever cracked a joke to their public, I mean a really funny, possibly even crass joke, they would be done. It wasn't ever inevitable that Bernhard would step outside of the aesthetic world he had created for himself and tell such a joke. After all, he stayed within his slightly abstract, nihilistic milieu right to the end.

This novel is beautiful like a plastic room designed by H.R. Geiger would be beautiful; but you wouldn't want to sit in it for long.

Neither Celine nor Bernhard had children. They didn't believe in humanity enough.

'The nights, Roithamer said, are always the worst. Everything is blown up out of all proportion, no matter how insignificant, at night it becomes monstrous, the most insignificant, the most harmless thing there is grows monstrous at night and won't let a man like me or Roithamer or Hoeller sleep.'



Some materials:

http://www.thomasbernhard.org/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/852

Famous historical fights: Gramsci vs. Il Duce

With the Murdochs back in the news again,  hegemony springs to mind, and with it the genesis of the idea.

Gramsci developed Marx and Engels’s theory of the economic superstructure, introducing the concept of hegemony into the general lexicon, and got locked up by the Duce for his troubles.

  

VS.

In brief - too, too brief - the theory goes: all aspects of life are determined materially (Marx & Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie) which is the economic superstructure (Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy), the controlling class of which employs the dissemination of information and judgments about values which justify and retrench that superstructure in terms of its desires (Gramsci, Prison Writings). The family – that is a bourgeois lie which produces new workers. The state – that is a bourgeois weapon to organise against the proles. Art – reflects the bourgeois lifestyle and the economic realities underpinning the apparently universal, objective ideals of Enlightenment.

According to Spengler’s history, the question of free will is the fundamental, sacrosanct dilemma of the Western ideology. Perhaps that is why Marxist determinism failed – fundamental inability to stomach the notion that all aspects of living are determined by the capitalist net. That, and the incessant obsession with revolution for its own sake (valorised in ’68; transformed in ’89 by the anti-Communist/ pro-capitalist revolutions across the Eastern Bloc). And the stupidity of the world envisaged by Marx post-revolution. Seven billion people ‘fishing, hunting and criticising art’ in a harmonious world beyond laws? Get real.

Is it a case of mistaking incidental consequences for deliberate entrapment by ideology? The proliferation of media can be seen as a direct and intentional consequence of 1. The capitalist’s desire for profit; or 2. The capitalist’s desire to fragment the desires of the working/ all classes – and I think the heterodox approach, including all classes in the critique of capitalism works better and sounds less like something from before the Modern Second Peloponnesian War – in order to water down resistance to the capitalist model of political economy. Doesn’t 1 logically precede 2? Hasn’t it been shown abundantly that ideologically-inspired adjustments to the economy will fail, and that the market determines itself?

Don’t get us wrong, Burning Pyre deplores the reductionism of our managerial capitalism, which sees life narrowly as the pursuit of economic interests, but we cannot imply that the ideology precedes the reality. Spirit/ Mind adjusts to material circumstances, Hegel taught. The making of money precedes the desire to make people think that they can only be happy by pursuing the ideology that making more money makes happy.

Hegel über Marxismus!* Duce oltre Gramsci!

On the other hand, we are perfectly willing to accept that something akin to Stockholm Syndrome prevents people from criticising the economic form of capitalism. How much harder is your job if you disagree with the principles on which it is founded, the incentive mechanisms used to ‘gee’ it along, and the organisational structures which are set up by the coal face, so to speak? Cognitive dissonance indeed.

So the Murdochs advance number 1 – making money – whilst influencing minds to their own agenda, which is not necessarily the capitalist one, other than by incidence. Propasphere is a much more accurate term to describe the illusion of objectivity under limited-consensus mass media.

 

*This tete-a-tete draws us into a debate about to what degree Hegel is the herald of liberal democratic capitalism of the Kojéve-Fukuyama variety.