OMGWTF
Unless this is some terrifying special remix for CD:UK, it appears that ‘Desire’ by Geri Halliwell has a reggae breakdown.
If Tony Blair was a liar, I’d vote for him
Who decided that the Iraq issue boiled down to the question of Tony Blair’s character? Not only is it a distraction from the actual objections to the war, it’s a distraction that is bound to let anyone responsible for the war, and Blair in particular, off the hook. Tony Blair’s problem is not that he is insincere: quite the contrary, the problem is that he is _hyper_-sincere, so sincere that his faith in what he’s doing becomes more important than the actual facts of what he’s done. To make Iraq about Tony Blair’s character is to completely play into his hands: if you want to launch personal attacks on Blair, better to follow Steve Bell’s example.
Meanwhile, anti-election posters have started appearing around Cambridge, which is nice to see.
I wish they bloody would pass over in silence…
So, it seems comment spammers have started quoting philosophy. I’ve just deleted comments advertising online casinos (or, strictly, advertising the concept of an online casino, as some of them don’t include any links) which also quote Tarski, Wittgenstein, Singer, and Heidegger’s infamous Hitler-praising address. The best, though, is apparently from Tolstoy: “Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.”
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Statists’ travelling circus
We had some election leaflets through our letter-box yesterday. Unfortunately, they were all a bit dull. Our local Respect candidate has no slogan of the quality of Salma Yaqoob’s in Birmingham. ‘No rats. No Rubbish’, carefully illustrated with a picture of a rat and some rubbish to demonstrate that this isn’t a hidden attack on the Labour cabinet.
UKIP, meanwhile, are pushing the crypto-fascist line nicely. Anti-immigrant paranoia? Yep. Pro-small business propoganda? Yep. And how about:
> [Europe] is threatened not only by mass unemployment in the euro-zone, but also by creeping
> integration towards a totalitarian superstate. This is being done by stealth, because once the
> people of the member states realize that their own politicians are betraying them, there is
> likely to be a mass revolt.
I must say, I hadn’t expected the ’stabbed in the back’ meme to make an appearence in this election. Still, their leaflet does tell us that the local candidate is an amateur mycologist, so I suppose it’s not all bad.
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Check out his Destiny’s Child review, too
In the course of (quite rightly) praising Ashlee Simpson’s ‘La La’, Sandy makes an interesting point about the revolutionary potential of boredom:
> I also think the lyrics and her superbored but raging delivery really evoke the way, when you’re an
> adolescent, there’s a kind of nonopposition of intensity and blankness of feeling. Or possibly read
> ‘when you’re an adolescent’ as ‘how I retroactively construct the concept of adolescence’.
The same is sort of true (although in a much less authentic sense) with Le Tigre’s cover of ‘I’m So Excited’. A song which, the internet has just revealed to me, has also been covered by Mel C (who, retrospectively, we can see was clearly the best Spice Girl).
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Vote nobody pirates
I got dragged into an action the other day. It was the first time I’ve done any activist stuff in ages (apart from going drinking with people - not sure whether that counts). Autonomous Students did a vote nobody action, which involved dressing up as pirates waving black flags, disrupting an “election day” and knocking over the conservative students table while handing out “vote nobody” leaflets. I think they disrupted an election meeting also, later but I wasn’t there. We were chased out and some people were threatened by security guards. It was weird - I haven’t been chased by and cops/ hired goons for quite some time. I was a little worried, however, that dressing in black and marching to disrupt a n election meeting could have been interpreted as crazy fascism.
I’ve been reading Nozick today - a crazy right wing anarchist, who thinks that we have natural property rights (I thought he would have justified private property on utiltarian grounds instead). We had a lecture on Mill and Nozick and freedom, and the lecturer spoke about laissez faire capitalism creating “strong individuals”. It’s interesting going to these philosophy lectures, and then revising microeconomics stuff in which the individual fufils their potential by choosing the right combination of eg. burgers and pizzas.
Just realised that the autonomous students page on the union site descibes us as “libertarian socialists.” Quite pleased with this - it’s a much better description than anarchist.
A weight off your mind
The new Oasis single is a bit of a relief, I think. Finally, an end to periodic worrying about whether a new song from Oasis will be great. I don’t think this will be a concern in the future, because ‘Lyla’ is a) about as good as one could reasonably imagine a new Oasis track to be and b) not really that good.
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One more effort if you wish to be anti-theists
infinite thought gets stuck in to the analytic philosophers of religion:
> Judging by the intellectual standards of the conference, however, it wouldn’t be hard to reinvent oneself as
> a theologian - nothing that came up was in any way more difficult than the A level syllabus we teach to 16-
> 18 year olds (and, indeed, many of the criticisms presented were much the same as the students intuit
> using only their ‘pure faculty of reason’).
k-punk is right, too, to suggest that analytic philosophers don’t take their crazy thought experiments seriously enough (I’ve suggested before that the best way to account for the difficulty of disproving the hypothesis that we’re brains in vats is to accept that we actually are brains in vats, albeit vats called ‘bodies’). In contrast to the timidity of the anglo-american theists and atheists (proponents, as Badiou would say, of the ‘little style’ of philosophy), k-punk calls for “a modern naturalistic religion,” neither a supernatural religion nor a secularism which simply accepts the conclusions of religion while denying their foundations.
I’m not so sure about that and, in particular, I’m not sure about how much Badiou can be roped into this enterprise. Badiou is not just an atheist, he is, I think, fundamentally irreligious. k-punk argues for a naturalist, monist, pantheism by supporting, against Badiou, two distinctions from Spinoza: the distinction between ‘there is one substance’ and ‘the substance is One’, and the distinction between the world under the aspect of eternity and the world in lived reality. But Badiou does not simply neglect these distinctions; instead, precisely the parts of his philosophy that I believe k-punk wants to use (in particular, the demolition of postmodern indecision) depend on denying the coherence of these distinctions. Much as I’m sure he doesn’t want to, by remaining within a religious frame of reference, k-punk risks remaining a prisoner of the pathos of finitude.
What makes Badiou fundamentally opposed to any religion is his interpretation of rejection of the One as a rejection of totality. It’s impossible to think of the universe as anything but an infinite and inconsistent multiple; so it’s impossible to say anything about the universe in total. From this standpoint, saying ‘there is one substance’ presupposes that ‘substance is One’ if only in the minimal sense that substance is unified enough to be spoken of at all (I don’t know if he does, but I think Badiou ought to reject the whole notion of substance – interestingly, for pretty much the reasons Agamben does). Mark characterises Spinoza’s materialism as subtractive, but if it is, it is not just subtractive of the supernatural, but of the natural as well. If “nothing is more natural than anything else,� then ‘nature’ is not a concept at all, and cannot justify the claim that there is one substance: a subtractive naturalism, then, is anti-monist (a suggestion infinite thought makes in the piece to which k-punk is responding).
This also explains why Badiou cannot accept a distinction between lived reality and the aspect of eternity – because there is no eternity, no temporal whole. Again, this is an example of Badiou’s banalisation of the infinte: rather than an eternity which is infinitely distant from lived experience, Badiou talks about the infinity of truth procedures in which we directly participate. Perhaps Badiou is a strange sort of ultra-humanist (I can’t point to any textual evidence to back this up, but it follows from what I’ve been saying so far, and it’s a plausible position to attribute to a Lacanian) — going beyond the traditional humanism which deposes God by deifying humanity, Badiou deposes humanity too _in the name of freedom and self-determination_, the freedom of the ‘empty’ subject from which humanity has been subtracted .
Actually, I think that’s the nub of my disagreement (and explains the sense I get when re-reading k-punk’s post that he in fact already knows what I’ve just been saying). I’m not sure what religion _is_ if it isn’t the positing of an infinity to contrast with actually existing finitude; and where k-punk supports Spinoza against Badiou he seems to confirm this. Can Spinozist monism avoid this? Or should we oppose weasly religion and whimpish secularism, not with a naturalistic religion but with an anti-naturalistic atheism. Maybe monism does not go far enough, and instead we need what might logically be called _nihilism_.
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Fuck me it’s Helen Love
I’d completely forgotten about Helen Love until I came across a track of theirs this morning. It slightly disturbs me to come across a band I last heard of getting on for ten years ago, particularly when they still sound exactly the same. I had one of their singles, too, I think it was ‘Punk boy’ or maybe ‘Does your heart go boom?’ — the B side featured a sample of an interview with Mark Radcliffe, in which he did his ‘Sheena Easton punk rocker’ joke (which, googling tells me, later turned into a track on the Shirehorses album).
Can we have a revolution now please?
Exhibit B:
k-punk is right, of course, that the election is Big Brother for the ‘political classes’. Unfortunately, the election is both more boring and more distracting than reality TV — which makes sense, thinking of Žižek’s claim that Big Brother is a particularly clever piece of consumer electronics, which we can set up to be bored on our behalf. Be that as it may, the way the election has rendered political discourse even more content free is doing may head in. It’s a fine example of why we should replace bourgeois democracy with something better.