Lacan on Tony Blair?
Well, actually Badiou on contemporary philosophy, but mutatis mutandis:
> Today, this hermeneutics of finitude seems to be in the process of reinstalling a pious discourse, a
> religiousity whose little God would seem to constitute the minimum of transcendence compatible with
> that democratic conviviality to which we are told there is no longer any conceivable alternative.
Incidentally, the Badiou collection Theoretical writings, from which the above comes, is excellent. ‘On subtraction’ really illuminates the theory of the event which underpins his Ethics, while ‘Mathematics and philosophy: the grand style and the little style’ is, among other things, the funniest piece of philosophy I’ve read for years.
Quite impressive
I hadn’t realised Abs’s album had been called Abstract theory. I also hadn’t realised it contained as good a song as ‘7 ways’, which sounds like a cross between Girls Aloud and Saint Etienne.
Further, I hadn’t realised that Li’l Jon used to be a dancehall DJ, but the evidence is amply provided by his reggae soundclash with Westwood on Saturday.
“Du, du-du, da-du, du-du-duh”
The Rock is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts, I think. The dramatic tension is all constructed around a communal concept of honour, unlike the Hong Kong films it visually resemble (which work with a confucian idea that honour is something the wise man can ‘roll up’ close to his chest). This leads to too much strong-jawed military angst interfering with the blowing up. On the other hand, it also leads to the sombrely martial soundtrack, which allowed Timbaland to find a sample for Brandy’s ‘I walked away’, so it’s not all bad.
“Shoulda hung around your psyche in my underwear”
“Considering their state of near-inertia, I’m frankly amazed at the rapidity of their descent into Pure Concept,” says Kid Shirt in a great post on Girls Aloud, whose new video doesn’t quite live up to expectations, I think, (although this might just be due to watching it in crappy streaming video).
A little understanding
Loving Neighbours at the moment. The Lana/Sky storyline shows promise of developing beyond it’s rather lame anti-homophobia PSA beginnings; even better, today the show took a brave step into pre-teen gender-queering, with Caleb persuading his girlfriend Summer to pretend to be a boy.
Like a gay Rammstein
The idea that Rammstein could be out-gayed hadn’t really occurred to me, but luckily the German Popstars winners have more imagination. Also good, I think, is Verbalicious, although I’ve only heard ‘Don’t play nice’ on a) the radio while muffled by the sound of a bus and b) in a terribly quality MP3, so I may be wrong. The PopJustice message boards insist “she honed her skills doing ‘battles’ round the midlands,” which has got to be a recommendation. Another recommendation is the hidden track I’d forgotten about at the end of the Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, a remix of ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ which is (slightly) less absurdly offensive _and_ sounds a bit like Stevie Wonder playing ’80s dance music, so that’s a result.
On another note entirely, the British section of the Situationist International has never been very big, so it’s nice to see people being introduced to the concept of a dérive at the recent rebel tech weekend in Birmingham.
T THE FILTH
I know you’re excited, but can you please stop flying your new helicopter over my neighbourhood for two or three hours each evening? It’s very noisy and the occasional play of searchlight on curtain is distracting.
KTHX BYE
How ideology explains
In a great post on a slightly rubbish article by Terry Eagleton, Chris Brooke says:
> It seems to me that in these kinds of cases the ideology follows the strategy, rather than
> determining it, whatever people may say about themselves on video just before they blow
> themselves up in Israel/Palestine. Which means that we might not learn very much about
> the phenomenon of suicide bombing by talking or writing or thinking much about
> whatever religious claims are made on its behalf by religious extremists and apologists for
> murder.
I don’t think the argument here quite works, and the reason why shows an interesting point about what a theory of ideology should do. It seems to me it’s a mistake to think that ideology is simply false and therefore irrelevant. Ideology is not just the lies that people tell to cover up some material situation; it’s the lies that _people in that material sitatuon_ tell about their material situation. It’s true, then, that ideology does not provide explanations in the sense of giving the causes of actions; but, precisely because ideology is an _effect_, studying it can tell us something about the actual causes of action.
My crystal ball
So, it turns out my prediction about Charles Clarke was right. On Newsnight just now (paraphrasing):
> CC: The Law Lords struck down our original detention policy, and said that we could not discriminate
> between UK citizens and others. So we are planning to extend the policy to UK citizens.
> JP: So, you’re saying that the policy was illegal.
> CC: No, ‘illegal’ wouldn’t be the right word.
The Human Rights Act is a brilliant interpretation of Agamben. It allows the Law Lords to declare that a policy contrevenes the Human Rights Act, but such a declaration _does not make the policy illegal_. It puts all of Human Rights into a rigorously legally recognised zone of indistinction between legality and illegality.
Aporias of the left
Norman Geras quotes an article about the Left which I thought was worth commenting on. Part of what the article says is correct; there _is_ a Left conservatism, which is theoretically committed to denying novelties in the global situation and manifests itself in a defensive practice directed to the conservation of the post-war consensus. But this is an interesting example of ideology in action:
> I get depressed hearing friends sound like paleocon isolationists or watching them
> reflexively assume that there’s something inherently tyrannical about the use of American
> power.
That is, anti-war arguments are dismissed _without having to be engaged with_ by characterising them as abstract dogmas. But of course the anti-war left doesn’t (or at least, we don’t all) merely _assume_ that American power is _inherently_ tyrannical; we have arguments that seek to demonstrate that the power of capitalist states (and they’re all capitalist states) is structurally constrained to be tyrannical.
What’s so odd about the pro-war left is that they have completely bought into this ideology. Not only do they ignore the structural arguments of their opponents, no supporter of the war (to my knowledge, I may be wrong) has put forward a structural argument to show how the global hegemony of the Western capitalist states would benefit left-wing goals. This is why liberal supporters of the war are so much more comprehensible than supposedly socialist or communist ones: you don’t expect liberals to have a structural argument (indeed, that’s pretty much the definition of a liberal, in Marxist terms). This is why pro-war leftists (and I don’t know if the author of the article is on the left, but variations of this quote could come quite happily from someone like Norman Geras, who is) can write stupid things like:
> America should be actively promoting the freedom of everyone on the planet, and the key
> question is, how would the left do it differently from the Bush administration?
It’s no coincidence, I think, that, while the traditional socialist/social democratic left has been racked with division over the war in Iraq, the other-globalisation movement has taken opposition to the war as a given, and it goes back to the conservatism I mentioned above. For those on the left schooled in the ‘balance of powers’ ideology of imperialism and the Third World War, international politics is construed in terms of state actors, and so easily collapses to the decision of which state to cheer on (or, for the most radical, which state to try and take over). But those of us fighting the Fourth World War see global politics differently. We know that states are now dead-weight, obstacles to be got around or, if need be, removed.