You know when you’re playing Snakes and Ladders as a child, and you roll a number that would take you to a snake, and you say “oh, that roll was an accident, it didn’t count,” and roll again? There you have the civilized Western defense of warfare: “Oh, we don’t kill civilians, except when we do, but that’s an accident and it doesn’t count.” Or rather, in the terrifyingly cheerful words of Don Shepperd on CNN this morning:
The problem is those weapons can malfunction. You can make fat-fingered typing errors. There are still mistakes in warfare. And that’s where you get those trenches full of bodies, Kyra.
Or so I thought. I’d seen a few of Frank Gehry’s buildings in the form of pictures or models, and perhaps in the flesh from a distance, and, while they’re undeniably attractive, they also seemed perhaps a little pointless. With the technological ability to produce buildings where the external form is more or less unconstrained by the builing’s purpose, I didn’t see any reason for him to choose the forms he actually uses, except for a kind of bland rococoism. But I had the chance to walk around his Music Center when I was in Los Angeles last week, and I’ve rather changed my mind. The way in which the petals of the structure open up to include a park, or to hide a Children’s Amphitheatre in a nook, or to reach out towards the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles, or the strangely growing pillars that support the interior of the concert hall itself are both beautiful and, in surprising ways, functional.
Hello, I, er, haven’t posted here for ages. I post so rarely now, that I feel I ought to re-introduce myself every time I do. Anyway, I’m still at Sussex , but I’m back in Cambridge at the moment, working.
I just saw the film, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.� I won’t attempt to write a review here (for more information see here), but I’d just like to make one point. I liked that the film puts even some of the extremely harsh actions of the Irish republicans in context. The film is not a straightforward glorification of the republicans. It shows, that the old IRA did some fairly unpleasant things (for instance, the killing of someone who really only informed on them out of fear). However, these things are not shown to be simple atrocities. We see why the characters think that these actions are necessary, in the context of a war against the British. The film starts with a young man being beaten to death by the Black and Tans for refusing to say his name in English. The characters feel that they must be brutal against an enemy like that. Although I am certainly not a pacifist, I dislike that kind of brutality (even if the killing of the rather frightened and repentant informer helped them tactically, it still would not be justified, in my view), but it was good to see it contextualised.
I do have more to say about this film, but I will need to do a bit more research first. I intend to post more frequently now that I’m not studying.
I was reminded of Žižek’s claim by a passage I came across in Iain Banks’s Inversions (the narrator here is a member of the pseudo-medieval society that forms the book’s setting):
“Yes, but what do you personally believe?”
I frowned at her, an expresion such a graceful, gentle face did not deserve to have directed at it. Did the Doctor really imagine that everyone went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe.
And I wonder if belief isn’t a modern phenomenon tout court, at least in the sense of personal belief. If that’s right, the paradoxical belief through purported non-belief that Žižek often identifies in contemporary ideology would be the structure of belief in general. Deleuze and Guattari write of psychoanalysis and its relation to myth:
Psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex gather up all beliefs, all that has ever been believed by humanity, but only in order to raise it to the condition of a denial that preserves belief without believing in it (it’s only a dream: the strictest piety today asks for nothing more).
What I wonder is: has anything “ever been believed by humanity” in the sense of belief that we nowadays posit in order to deny? Or is the past simply the ultimate screen for the cynic’s projection: the pre-moderns are made to believe so that we don’t have to.