Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Martyrs for Language

It is unlikely that indentured slaves were worked as hard as grunt Marines in Vietnam. Certainly not with as little to show for it. The sociology that kept these men from escaping entirely through drugs or killing their officer-oppressors is complex - a mix of fear of authority, comradeship, exhausted inertia and the vague hope that their suffering might end without death. Patriotism, revenge, and military pride didn’t register on the meter of soldierly motivations.

Officers, that class of person whom the military suspects might be human, are ambitious prats. The young ones want medals; the older ones want rank and larger commands. Few of them have much regard for the lives of those who report to them. Their main concerns are recognition and reputation. As in most corporate hierarchies, they progress proportionately to their political skill not their competence.

Within the permanent class warfare between officers and enlisted in ‘The Corps,’ other intense battles are waged continuously - between the whites and the blacks, staff and line, liberals and racists, new boys and old hands, short-timers and those who dare not count the days left, lifers and draftees, malingerers and hard men, the weak and the strong, the literate and the unschooled. Occasional shooting and fear eases the tensions but never resolves them.

The politics among officers is simpler: Be noticed; never contradict a superior; have faith in the language of command. This latter includes the idolatry of maps, situation reports, body counts, radio protocols, intelligence estimates, and plans of attack and defence. An officer’s world is entirely symbolic as soon as he is given any unit command whatsoever. This is what he is trained for. Reality is only known by the grunts and no one asks them about it. Unfortunately only they know that the map is not the territory.

One of the important innovations of the Vietnamese War was so-called air mobility, the capacity to move large numbers of fighters quickly to remote places. What the military failed to understand at the time was that it was easier to move the men than to keep them supplied with the essentials of life (and for that matter, death). Despite the rather well-stocked commissaries for those in the rear, front-line troops literally starved when they couldn’t be supplied by air... or were just forgotten about. The language of intimidatory command doesn’t work on technology and other objects like it does on human beings.

The involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a military and moral tragedy. But not primarily because of defeat and the atrocities committed routinely by American soldiers. The tragedy already existed in the military and its ethos before VietNam. And it continues to exist today. This ethos is one of exploitation of the young by the old. The old sacrifice the young for the sake of symbols and through symbols that mask personal interests. Everything else is collateral damage. This is the essence of military life.

The dead and wounded are, therefore, only one consequence of this sacrificial ethos. Those, like the Marines in Matterhorn, who are exposed to its full force never recover. And it is passed on like a virulent virus from generation to generation. Their memory of suffering produces yet more symbology for which to sacrifice yet more young people. Matterhorn is a chronicle of how symbols not bullets are used to dominate and destroy human beings.

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A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Holding Retribution

African slavery has produced an inestimable amount of suffering in the world, not only in the past but also as a legacy which just keeps on giving. It continues to humiliate long after it has ceased to incarcerate. Often in the most subtle, and therefore profound, ways, slavery continues to repress and to kill.

Jamaica Kincaid’s bio-rant is a catalogue of the residue of slavery in Antiqua - and in the Caribbean and the Americas more generally. What remains from the formal ownership of people by other people is a commercial dominance symbolised most forcefully by tourism. The tourist is the modern liberal, middle-class slave-owner. “A tourist is an ugly human being.” The tourist is hated by the people he exploits just as the slave-owner was hated by the same people.

Like his predecessors, the modern owner lives elsewhere - in Europe and North America- and has his gang-bosses ensure the work gets done. The minor organisational innovation is that the bosses are now black rather than white and are called politicians. But the slaves are still tied to the place, unable to move; and they’re still the servants, and field-hands in their own country. Or rather in the country to which they were transported:

“What I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?)”

But there is an oddity here. Kincaid hints at it when she says, “We felt superior, for we were so much better behaved and we were full of grace, and these people were so badly behaved and they were so completely empty of grace.” The island of Antigua is a very religious place. Its density of Moravian, Baptist, Independent Evangelical, Pentecostal, Adventist, Christadelphian, Methodist, and Anglican churches is remarkable. Christianity dominates the culture of the island.

And yet Christianity is also the clearest remaining component of the colonial past. Christianity justified the very slavery that caused the African presence on the island. Missionaries were just another fact of the colonial regime. Indeed the colonists were ‘badly behaved’ but was that because or despite their religious sentiments? And is the interpretation given to Christianity by the Antiguans, and other colonised people, superior or simply more naive than that of their former masters? Is this Christianity an example of Nietzsche’s slave-mentality, a way to exercise dominance without undue (and inefficient) violence?

Christianity, as a remnant of salve-owning colonialism, has an interesting political effect. It is often, as in Antigua, shared by an entire population. Its claim for the existence of ‘another world’ is interpreted by the elite as a justification to exploit this one. And, simultaneously, it is interpreted by the exploited as a reason for hope. Christianity thus forms an ideal basis for a culture of continuing slavery. Perhaps Nietzsche wasn’t overstating his case.

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The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Faith Against Religion

Karl Barth, probably the most important evangelical theologian of the 20th century, famously proclaimed that Christianity was not a religion. By this he meant that Christianity was unlike any other spiritual belief in the history of the world. And he was right.

Christianity is not a religion as the world knew religion before it existed. Christianity is an ideology, a style of thought which seeks to establish the superiority of language, its language, over all other human experience.

An absolute belief in language is what is called faith. And although Barth tried his best to separate faith from language, he failed. According to him, not even scripture could be considered as the Word of God given its status as a component of a fallen creation. But what he demonstrated through his hundreds of books and ten of thousands of pages, and millions of words, is that without language Christianity simply evaporates into nothing. Faith is necessarily linguistic idolatry.

The leaders of the Christian Church throughout its history knew and feared what Barth unintentionally showed. Religion is concerned with that which is beyond language. Faith is crucially dependent upon language and the control of language. As the world became increasingly literate, such control is harder to exercise.

Ecclesial control of language starts with the selection and approval of originary stories (like gospels), which are expressions of individual or group experiences. These are condensed into creeds, verbal statements that are the means by which members of a faith identify one another. But since the language of such creeds has no tangible referents, they must be furthered developed, in language, into official interpretations, doctrines, and systematic theologies.

With every step in the linguistic development of faith, the gap between faith and religion grows wider. Faith is by definition an intellectual activity contained solely within the boundaries of officially approved language. Any expression of religious sentiment or experience outside these boundaries is the definition of heresy.

Heresy is an event that occurs only in language, when unapproved language is used or when official language is criticised as inadequate to describe religious experience. Heresy is the perennial problem of Christianity (and other religions who have succumbed to the Christian trap of equating religion with faith, like Islam).

The suppression of heresy - not the promotion love or justice or tolerance or any other virtue - is the prime directive of faith. In other words, the entire ethical ‘contents’ of the Christian Faith is subordinate to the absolute need to preserve not just the language of Christian belief, but also the authority of the church leaders to dictate that language.

The Inquistion is the name given to the medieval attempts to maintain church authority over language. But the Inquisition was not the first or last, nor the most violent of such attempts. The suppression of language starts with the first expressions of Christianity and continue throughout its history into its various schisms, sectarian ‘reformations’ and fundamentalist pronouncements.

The history of these suppressive activities is so well documented as to be of no real surprise to educated people. What is less obvious, and of far more importance, however, is that the Christian idea of faith is the foundation for all ideology. Ideology is the enduring legacy of Christianity regardless of the decline in the institution itself.

Fascism, Communism, Liberal Democracy, even Anarchism as a political movement, are all possible because of the idolatry of language pioneered by Christianity. Each of these has in fact been explicitly supported by its proprietary political theology. And all depend upon the same faith in language whose descriptions of the world have very little to do with its reality. Among other things, Christianity has taught us how to feel comfortable with killing others for the sake of words.

Kitsch’s book is a popular version of the history of the medieval Inquistion. And he correctly connects modern events like the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to inquisitorial techniques and attitudes. But what he fails to do is understand the relationship between the control of language and the modern world of competing, largely implicit, ideologies. The problem today is not the power of the Church to commit atrocities but the rationalisation of atrocities committed by the secularised idolatry of language.

The problem in other words is not religion, it is faith. This is where Karl Barth was heading, but he couldn’t bear the consequences. Many still can’t.

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Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Paranoid Fiction

There is a crucial difference between journalistic and scientific inquiry. The former creates a narrative in order to make sense of existing facts. The latter formulates a story which justifies new facts. Journalism is necessarily political in the sense that it assigns relative values to what is already known. Science establishes an alternative politics, that is, it disrupts whatever calculus of values has been agreed upon. As a consequence, no one likes scientists, except other scientists... and not even all of them.

Inspector Croce is a scientific cop. He searches for new facts rather than relying on what is known by convention. He instinctively uses the primary technique of scientific inquiry, what philosophers of science call ‘abduction.’ Abduction is a form of logic which is distinct from both deduction (the derivation of truths from other truths) and induction (the derivation of truths from facts). Abduction derives facts from other facts. More precisely, abduction makes guesses about what must be the case given the existence of known events and conditions. These are called hypotheses.

Abduction shouldn’t be confused with mere intuition. Intuition, a sudden glimpse of a possibility (like a flash from a lighthouse, one of Piglia‘s metaphors ), is certainly a part of the process of abduction, but only on the sense that literacy is a requirement for deduction or sensory capability is assumed for induction. The ‘listening to one’s voices’ must be followed by an ability to formulate an entirely new whole which is ‘bigger’, that is to say, more inclusive than some other description of a situation. This takes courage, first because novelty is mistrusted by others, but also because abduction produces nothing more than a guess until the new fact is verified by other facts.

The scientific cop (and the scientist in many cases) is therefore politically vulnerable - particularly to journalists. He or she is a minority of one who does not align with any alliances of existing thought or interests (these are often the same thing). Hypotheses have no political weight. This condition is a constant regardless of culture. It prevails in the post-Peronist regime of Argentina but also in every other social environment. No one likes the inherent dislocation implied by the discovery of new facts about the world. After all, such facts tend to make everyone look foolish. Suppression, denial and slander are consequently to be expected.

Piglia, according to his translator, has referred to his work as ‘paranoid fiction.’ This seems apt, but not because Inspector Croce keeps an open list of suspects. The paranoia is social. Everyone suspects that Croce’s abductive method could drag them into the mire of a murder. And as the saying goes: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the world, or Inspector Croce, is not out to get you.

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The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

All the World’s A Pulpit

Catherine Chung has issues. Many, many issues. All packed tightly into this sardine tin-like novel of academic mathematics: misogyny and male cruelty of almost every sort to women, casual racism, inter-generational miscommunication, parental abandonment and lone parenting, warfare on two continents, international child smuggling, American academic politics, absence of sisterhood in science, the sad biographies of a number of important mathematicians ancient and modern (most ending badly), personal betrayal, sexual harassment, family deceit, PTSD, some not very subtle didacticism about number theory, and... oh yes, the frustrations of research into the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Chung has just too many axes to grind, so many that none are made very sharp at all. I get it that most men are dicks and that women suffer terribly as a consequence. But this is hardly a revelation. That racism is endemic in small town America is also not a surprise. That families have secrets, lovers irritate one another, and life is often complicated and disappointing are not terribly newsworthy (or fiction worthy) topics unless some other literary purpose is served. Even the quite valid point that injustice reigns in a supposedly civilised world is on its own nothing more than a trite observation. Chung’s appreciation of the aesthetics of mathematics is clear, but her skill in communicating that appreciation is far less so. And the narrative glue, the central mystery of the piece, is so unlikely that it verges on literary criminality. The whole leads nowhere, at least nowhere interesting, certainly not a destination.

I think the takeaway from this book is that if an author intends to preach, he or she really has to decide what they want to preach about. The sin and its source have to be made explicit. Universal evil doesn’t have much credibility, even among hardened Gnostics. Serious writers then must ensure that no one knows they’re preaching if they’re doing so outside a church, synagogue, or mosque. Preaching reaches only as far as the choir in any case, and often not even that far. Much better to let moral outrage emerge through subtle insight than to have one’s protagonists agonise continuously about it. And if you’re describing bad behaviour, it helps to suggest a way such behaviour might be mitigated other than by the wholesale incarceration of those bearing the XY chromosomal infirmity. Otherwise even your fans might abandon the cheap seats for a more entertaining venue.

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Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Poetry of Dominance

Violence is a necessary if regrettable condition of civilisation. A few of us who enjoy the comforts of civilisation are uncomfortable with that reality. Such violence appears overtly from time to time but it exists continuously in subtle forms of coercion that sustain relationships of domination and exploitation which are what constitute civilisation. It is the threat of violence which keeps us secure, at least when we are not the recipient of the threat.

It is this that constitutes “the invisible background of systemic violence” which is the subject of Žižek’s analysis. It is an awkward subject precisely because it is invisible to most of us. We can only see it askance, as it were, out of the corner of the eye. This kind of violence he calls “the dark matter” of society (I should have preferred ‘dark energy’). It must be present for society to exist at all. But we must infer its properties because it can’t be observed directly. We are therefore forced into a poetical mode of discourse: “poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to.”

Liberal sympathies, says Žižek, are with those subjected to overt, visible violence, never with those oppressed by the invisible violence which assures the comforts of liberality. Yet it is the invisible violence that most often generates the visible. The invisible is systemic violence and by definition it is directed toward those who are perceived merely as potential, not actual, threats. Whatever might disrupt liberal security must be prevented. Liberals fail to connect the dots. Social conservatives at least recognise the reality of the use of violence against specific parts of a polity.

As I write, London as well as other cities around the world are experiencing the protests organised by the so-called Extinction Rebellion. This seems to be a coalition of the somewhat young and the somewhat old to exert pressure for the political awareness of climate change. Yesterday, after a week of disruption, several protestors were beaten when they interrupted train services in London Docklands. Liberal commentators have been outraged that ‘honest’ protest has met with such a violent response.

But the Extinction Rebellion actions have accomplished something important. They have made visible first the objective systemic violence that they themselves have created (there is no doubt that closing down London Transport is a violent act). And, second, several of their members have suffered the subjective violence perpetrated by the responding systemic violence of a London mob. Whether the protestors will also be prosecuted with the implicit systemic violence of the state is not yet determined. Žižek, I think, would appreciate the concrete example of his theory in all its intricacies.

Žižek, being Žižek, that is to say, a Marxist of the old school, names the ultimate source of systemic violence as Capitalism. Many in Extinction Rebellion appear to agree with him. And indeed there is good reason to associate the economic inequalities and environmental destruction around the world with what is blithely called global capitalism. But this structure of violent control is as unlike what Marx thought of as Capitalism as what Stalin thought of as Democracy. Marxist theory was obsolete almost as soon as it was formulated. Marx knew about the factory and the factory owner not the corporation and corporate members. Using Marxist theory today to formulate a theory of systemic violence is futile.

The world as it exists is neither capitalist in the sense that Marx used the term, nor freely competitive in the sense that liberal economists use to defend ‘efficient’ economic arrangements. The world is corporate. That is, it is ruled by very large institutions whose primary function is to internalise competitive economics and make them personal under rules dictated by the corporation. These institutions dominate not only the individuals whom they employ but the governments which depend upon corporate employees health and well-being to fund their democratic elections and to fulfil their political promises of prosperity and security.

It is the corporate world, not the political or judicial world which has systemic power and controls systemic violence. It maintains this power in a way never contemplated by Marx, nor by liberal economic theorists, by enrolling individuals into the safety and security of the corporate structure. Having a place in the independent corporate hierarchy insulates its members from personal attack, at least regarding the consequences of their professional or economic actions. As a society, we enthusiastically want this kind of security even if it implies far less security in society in all its other aspects.

To summarise the situation: the dominant modern institution of the corporation has popularised avarice. Avarice is not greed in the sense of desiring the acquisition of an excess of certain things - food, shelter, warmth, physical care - but the accumulation of nothing in particular, merely more of whatever it is that others have. Capital is now corporate capital, which is not owned by anyone. What others do have is position, reputation, status, and reward within the corporation. This is what really counts as the key to all other parts of life, particularly to the physical, legal and other social aspects of security one might naturally desire. All modern life is corporate life; the corporation, we implicitly presume, will protect us as the rest of the world goes to hell in a basket.

Hence Žižek is often blowing stale hot air. He knows that old fashioned communism is a dead letter in the archives of history. Among other things, communism involves at least as much systemic violence as capitalism. He also knows that we are in the position of “G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, in which the highest police authority is the same person as the super-criminal, staging a battle with himself.” We bring systemic violence on ourselves and simultaneously distract ourselves with concerns for the victims of that same violence. But the cause is not the inherent conflict of those who possess capital and those who do not. It is between those who have corporate protection and those who do not.*

Žižek’s implicit message is that we need to read more, especially more poetry, and more critically. I can’t deny that this is probably a good idea. But despite his erudition and numerous literary, sociological, and philosophical insights, I think he still doesn’t understand today’s world for what it is: namely, governed everywhere by corporate interests which are impervious to any equivalent countervailing power, including poetry.

*This seems to me a rather good theory for explaining the rise of Trumpism. Trumpists would be horrified to find themselves associated with Marx. It is their alienation from the corporate world not from capitalism that is most apparent from both their geographic locations and their gripes about being effectively ejected from their secure corporate existence.

Postscript: My wife has reminded me that in fact poetry may indeed be just the thing needed and quoted this from memory:

I Am the Only Being Whose Doom
by EMILY BRONTË

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn;
I never caused a thought of gloom,
A smile of joy, since I was born.

In secret pleasure, secret tears,
This changeful life has slipped away,
As friendless after eighteen years,
As lone as on my natal day.

There have been times I cannot hide,
There have been times when this was drear,
When my sad soul forgot its pride
And longed for one to love me here.

But those were in the early glow
Of feelings since subdued by care;
And they have died so long ago,
I hardly now believe they were.

First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.

’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.

Post-postscript: For more 0n the literary theory of the corporate world see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And on the institution of the corporation itself, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Post-post-postscript: there are a number of fictional accounts of corporate violence; but one of the most moving is this: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Selfish Gene Pool

My mother had six live births. The eggs didn’t get any better as they went on. Neither did the quality of family life. I don’t know if she actually wanted all those children or was forced into her situation by religion and a high libido husband. In either case it wore her out and I think she came to regret imposing all these fairly strange people on the world.

It seems to be unacceptable in much polite company to point out that the urge to procreate is as necessary to constrain as any other. I think this is Lessing’s point. The desire for children, for a family life filled with one’s offspring and the emotional satisfaction of their presence is as subject to excess, perversion, and rationalisation as any other.

Let’s face it: there are no good reasons to produce children. They are expensive, emotionally and physically exhausting, destructive of the relationships which produced them, a continuing drain on the world’s (including the grandparents’) limited resources, and they, of course, are likely to contribute to an indefinite extension of this situation into an infinite future.

And all that is the best case scenario. Nature and nurture combine forces not infrequently to produce people who actually don’t contribute an iota to the world’s happiness quotient. The odds are that the more children one has the more likely there will be a genetic, psychological, or behavioural defect in the bunch. There are orders of magnitude more homicidal criminals than potential Nobel laureates in the world. As I said: the eggs don’t get any better. Neither does their care.

Neither happiness, nor any other sort of ‘fulfilment’ is an inalienable right of any human being. The pursuit of happiness may be sanctioned by law and democratic tradition, but this is merely license to invent fantasies which are almost always Ill-conceived and require the sacrifice of others in order to be achieved. They are the stuff of neuroses, economic externalities, and inevitable disappointments. Pursuing happiness - particularly by creating a large family - is a mug’s game. The only winners are psychiatrists, self-help gurus, and divorce lawyers. And, although smug, none of them are likely to be happy either.

I’m betting that if transhumanism ever really becomes a thing, the machines will be savvy enough to eliminate reproduction entirely.

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Fury by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eat Me, America

Anger, unaccountable, existentially driven, psychologically depressing, non—directive anger is the subject matter of Fury. It is anger without a source and without any definite object, pure anger at being alive. It is anger that cannot be assuaged by apology or bought off by restitution. If one were religious, it might be directed toward God in a Job-like tirade. But in an atheist like Solly Solanka it can only be bottled up and leak out unexpectedly for the most trivial reason.

Solly, a cosmopolitan native of the sub-continent, is aware of his paradoxical situation. He has no reason to be angry; yet he is. This makes him angrier still. The world is alien to him. Not just the people but also the architecture, the food, the culture. Everything irritates him from the insane chat of the cleaning lady to the trivialities of the gossip mags. Every comment, every sound, every person grates. He knows it’s his fault, not theirs. But does that really matter?

Solly collects dolls. In fact he made a fortune through dolls - not by collecting but by creating a best selling one called Little Brain. His commercial success has allowed him to bail from his academic Cambridge donnery (dondom? donnage?) to join the New York glitterati as a media luvvie. This is somewhat strange because one of the few things that Solly knows he is really, really angry about is America. He hates its foreign policies, its garish superficiality, its casual racism, its self-satisfied neediness to make anything worthwhile in the world into a commodity it owns.

Solly has escaped Europe precisely because of what America is. “America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured,” he says. His anger is not even noticed in America where everyone is angry about something, and where there are even people like him who are angry about everything. Solly is in his element - the pseudo-sophisticated sham of the Manhattan bien-pensant baroque culture of death. He doesn’t want to be a part of this culture, he wants to be consumed by it as a response to his own self-disgust.

Unfortunately all this anger goes nowhere. It is never explained or resolved but peters out in an unfortunate and sordid set of romances. Kingsley Amis’s Money covered more or less the same ground but with much less hoopla and name dropping. As an almost prophetic statement of the psychological situation of the world just prior to 9/11, I suppose it has merit. But as a novel it’s a collection of snappy lines and even snappier digs that goes nowhere..

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House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Science May Be Hazardous to Your Health

House of Leaves is certainly sarcastic. It uses a Borges-like found-manuscript containing numerous pseudo-factual references to ‘document’ the creation of a video production of questionable authenticity. The question is whether the book is frivolous or serious sarcasm. Frivolity would place it in a class with pieces like The Blair Witch Project which simply and openly waste readers’ time with pointless and unrewarded anticipation. Although that may be where it belongs as a whole, there are parts that might in fact be a more serious critique of the human obsession with abstract knowledge, what is generally termed Science (or at least academic science). If House of Leaves has such a serious component, perhaps it might qualify as a cautionary allegory.

The house on Ash Tree Lane, the cosmos of the book, as it were, presents an epistemological problem. It appears to be one quarter of an inch bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This is a typical start for a scientific inquiry. Some quantity is measured - size, speed, volume, trajectory - and is used to confirm or reject a theory or hypothesis. The only really interesting measurement, however, is that which detects a difference at some increased level of precision from previous measurements. This difference, once confirmed, is what provokes questions about existing theories and can lead to new knowledge. Or so some schools of the philosophy of science hold.

Once started, the inquiry to understand the difference in measurement takes on its own momentum. Other people are recruited into the effort - specialists with high-tech instruments, teams which invest time and resources, even family members who may be effectively ignored in favour of the inquiry. It is really at this stage that the inquiry becomes properly scientific in the sense that it is a publicly shared effort not merely personal research. Investigative work is planned, tasks allocated, responsibilities assigned.

What often happens then, with Science as well as the house as Ash Tree Lane, is that the inquiry opens up completely unexpected theoretical avenues - not unlike, say, the formulation of quantum mechanics from ‘established’ Newtonian physics at the beginning of the 20th century. Rather than determining the true dimensions of the house, those involved find that their investigations appear to be changing the house. Rooms appear, corridors lead to yet more distant rooms, great halls open up, stairways penetrate unknown depths. The mystery of the house deepens. As new spaces are discovered, the former level of ignorance looks trivial in retrospect.

From an insignificant initial difference, therefore, enormously different perceptions arise. Everyone involved becomes confused. Professional rivalries flare up. Careers are made and lost. Families fragment. Friendships are destroyed. The house itself seems a mysterious living creature which may be a hostile danger to those investigating it. Yet to those outside, those who are not part of the community of inquiry, the house appears as it always has. If asked, these outsiders would think the insiders were hallucinating. The insiders are aware of this so are hesitant to report their findings, largely because they really don’t have any. Typical science.

From a literary point of view, House of Leaves would probably have made an interesting short story or novella - at least if it does have any of the serious content I suggest. The fact that it goes on for 700 pages or so does count against my theory. It’s wildly excessive. On the other hand, the parallel narrative of the finder of the originary document who goes slowly mad as he reads it, does suggest that the penalty for pushing unprepared into the study of human knowledge has some very serious potential side effects. Perhaps that’s what the author indicates when he says, “See, the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction. [The author] knew from the get go that what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same.” Like I said: sarcasm of indeterminate type.

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Same Same by Peter Mendelsund

The Trap of Creative Ambition

The command to know oneself is one of those shibboleths of ancient philosophy that are taken as universally sound advice. But the obsessive drive to know oneself is a trap. Knowing oneself can become an ambition like any other: it absorbs the life that’s meant to be improved into itself and creates a prisoner who is at the mercy of the ambition. Even if the ambition in question is purely intellectual, the trap is set.

In fact all ambitions end up in the same sump of attempting to know oneself. The thematic core of the novel captures the common thread: “Become the best you.” This is the pervasive ethos of Freehold, the desert country and its Institute populated by creative geniuses in various fields from Brand Management and Financial Derivatives to Astrology and Architecture. Whatever their intellectual speciality, all end up pursuing some vision of themselves, that “ineffable, secret self.” The Institute is the ultimate self-help programme.

The Institute runs on words, lots of words, and therefore lots of paper. It also provides “deliberation arenas, thought-huddles, and social pods” for the exchange of words among the residents. The Director of the Institute is very concerned to generate “ideas that are transmissible, scalable, and viable.” He wants “The PERFECT project and Discourse™. Relatable, marketable, profound, digestible, fun, fresh, smart…a masterful theorization of the Now.” This demands hard work from all the residents and “requires your complete buy-in. FULL bandwidth... End-to-end; ERROR-FREE channels. Proactivity. Actualization.” Words, of course, seem to have their own ideas and eventually gum up the works, literally and figuratively. Words can make you crazy; or mask the craziness already there. Wordspace is not meatspace, even if they do leak into one another.

The sci-fi (or fantasy, the genre is tough to pin down) gimmick Mendelsund employs to motivate the action is a Neal Stephenson-like reproductive facility, the Same Same Shop. The Same Same Shop can not only replicate anything from clothing to currency, it can repair and restore things as well. The technology of the Same Same Shop, whatever it is, seems to know the essence of the things brought to it for help. It, uncannily, understands their reality and is able to reconstruct this reality as needed. It even knows about the reality of words as unreal and self-referential. A sort of high-tech, post-modernist Kabbalah.

And if the Same Same Shop can fix things, why shouldn’t it fix people? Particularly people with burnt out minds who are bored with life, addicted to various substances, and unable to any longer function irl (‘in real life;’ it’s essential to understand Mendelsund’s blogspeak). Perhaps it might even fix the abuse of language that is rampant within the Institute, and that reflects the general banality of the culture which produced it. If only...

The real question is: Can the Same Same Shop do anything at all to help the creative luvvies at the BBC find themselves and come up with better programming on Saturday nights?

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Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Intentional Intellectual Blindness

Alain de Botton should be deeply ashamed of this book. If he isn’t, it can only be due to his continued ignorance of the most important research ever conducted about his chosen subject. The French philosopher and literary critic, Rene Girard spent most of his professional career analysing and theorising about the problem de Botton addresses: envy, its sources and its consequences. In 2005, the year after the publication of de Botton’s book, Girard, author of more than 30 books on the subject, was named as one of the 40 "Les immortals" members of the Academie française. Yet Girard doesn’t even rate a footnote in Status Anxiety.

It is inconceivable that anyone as widely read in European culture as de Botton had never encountered Girard’s work. De Botton’s meandering discourse touches every even tangentially relevant subject, from literature, philosophy, and history to religion politics and advertising; from Jesus to Adam Smith, from Plato to Freud. The exclusion of Girard cannot be accidental, or incidental. It is clearly meant as a slight and becomes an insult when de Botton does not even implicitly address his differences with Girard’s thought. This is shocking. The consequence is that de Botton’s thesis is thin, unsubstantial, and not very interesting.

According to de Botton, envy is at root a sort of love, not between two people but between a person and what de Botton calls “the world.” He redefines love “as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another’s existence.” He then claims that “we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value,” a psychological condition which prompts us to seek confirmation of self-worth in others. As he puts it rather regretfully, “We seem beholden to the affections of others to endure ourselves.” At best, therefore, this is a desire for love; but it is certainly not love, nor even respect. And it has much less to do with the world in general than with those closest to us.

The problem with de Botton’s subsequent discourse (it can hardly be called an argument) is that it does nothing to support his theory. After its assertion, the theory is dropped and replaced with extended analyses of historical attitudes toward wealth and poverty, not about the psychological sources of love, respect, or, most importantly, envy. He attributes our current purported condition to egalitarian democracy, other-worldly Christianity, and paradoxically a general improvement in living standards. All very ad hoc, only vaguely plausible, and entirely fragmentary. The book reads like notes for an unfocused doctoral dissertation which itself is causing a bit of anxiety for its author.

At several points de Botton does stray into Girardian territory, for example when he says, “Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.” And again when he recognises that “We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group.” But these are trivial observations, never developed, which themselves need theoretical explanations. These he does not provide. Nor does he have any substantive suggestions of how to deal with the issue, either personally or socially.

Girard’s theory of envy on the other hand doesn’t grasp for every questionable straw of cultural evidence. It starts with a not so evident hypothesis of what he calls mimetic desire. In brief, this hypothesis proposes that we want things mainly because other people want them. We are able to learn to do this because we are social animals. We are taught to do this by our parents, our friends, and Madison Avenue. But ancient myths and history show that the processes involved in mimetic desire are neither new nor the consequence of modern industrial (or post-industrial) society.

De Botton can only be fatalistic because he has no real explanation: “The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.” This is not just hollow, it is also silly. Why write the book at all if this is its conclusion. It says nothing; an intellectual dead-end. Girard, on the other hand, provokes any number of possible directions for fruitful thought (See here for several: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). So if you find envy an important topic, you know where to go (and not) for some stimulating ideas.

Postscript 7Oct19: The situation is actually more sinister than I suspected. Wholesale appropriation seems to be involved: https://mimeticmargins.com/2013/04/15...

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The Leviathan by Joseph Roth


Ageing Without Grace

It is of course not only the young who stupidly want whatever they believe might be a better life. The old have their own sort of silliness. The spouse didn’t turn out a perpetual beauty. The hometown is boringly provincial. Business doesn’t have the same thrill it used to. So why not make a new start? Have a little fun? Recapture some of that lost youthful enthusiasm? Well, because that’s not how life works. It has its own trajectory upon which our plans are no more than commentary. Leviathan, not Jehovah, disposes. And Leviathan is notoriously haphazard.

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This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund


Swedish Mist

I find it both odd and annoying that Martin Hägglund should choose to present his otherwise sensible philosophy in terms of faith. He apparently intends to establish philosophical thought as a sound basis for ethics without reference to religion. On the face of it, he would like to replace religious faith with faith of some other sort. My question is ‘Why?’

Although not all religions rely on faith, Christian insistence that faith is equivalent to religion has penetrated global consciousness. But even among Christians, there is no agreement on what constitutes faith except the communal profession of some verbal formula. Since Hagglund does not propose any alternative credal statement to the Christian religion, or any other, it is clear that he is not using the term ‘faith’ in any recognisably religious sense.

Instead Hägglund constructs a straw man. His essential claim is that “the common denominator for what I call religious forms of faith is a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” This may be. Those religions which emphasise the existence of some other world than the universe we inhabit, in which perfect justice is achieved, human defects are corrected and happiness reigns do implicitly devalue not just human beings but also all that exists.

But not all thought which accepts the possibility of a reality beyond expression, perhaps even beyond perception, insists upon such a position. Yet such thought is religious in the specific sense that our consciousness itself implies an impenetrable mystery about our existence and its place in the cosmos.

Many, for example, myself included, consider literature as a religion. Our liturgy consists principally in our acts of reading and writing. These acts are exploratory but they are never decisive. Language, that which exists within us, and around us, and yet is not part of us, is our God. This is a God which we use mercilessly but which also uses us with the same absence of care.

We may reverence our God, but we do not idolise it. We respect the immense power of language and we continuously try to outwit it. We are bound to fail, not because we are finite but because the God of language, our own creation, is infinite in its potential. We will never exhaust its possibilities, nor be able to control either its use or the way in which it connects to the world of other things.

What we do not have is faith in language. We mistrust it because it lies about the world, which is not constructed according to its principles. We try relentlessly to pin it down by definition and explanation to no avail as we find that words can only be defined by other words. Through language we create law and society and prosperity. We also create hydrogen bombs, and gas chambers, and racist mobs. We may pretend that we are free in our use of language. But the reality is that we are trapped by it and within it. It is the source of our unfreedom, something Hagglund would like, mistakenly, to attribute to religion.

Importantly, there is no creed of the God Language. Language is undoubtedly there, it exists, but equally it is beyond our comprehension in its scope, its future, or even when it first appeared among us. It is eternal, but there is nothing about language which can be distilled into fundamentals of belief. Hagglund would reject this, however: “all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of unfreedom,” he says.

Hägglund doesn’t like the eternal as a fundamental principle, a sort of credal premise of his secular faith: “The problem is not that an eternal activity would be ‘boring’ but that it would not be intelligible as my activity.” In this he is simply too prejudiced by faith to be argued with. Language will never become boring. I challenge Hägglund to even express the feeling of boredom without it! How free would he be without the eternity of language?

So while I agree with Hägglund’s thesis that religious faith is bad for humanity and bad for existence, it is faith not religion which is the issue. There is no need for a secular faith because faith is the problem to be solved not allowed to expand. Faith kills regardless of its content. It kills intellectually by attempting to fix what the world is in language. It’s kills biologically by insisting upon ‘natural’ relations of power which are expressed in terms of language. And it kills spiritually by implying that there is some endpoint at which the exploration of language will reach its goal.

In short, it appears that Hägglund is preaching to a philosophical or religious choir that feels itself deficient without some sort of faith. There is no valid reason to do this. In fact he is implicitly justifying the acts of religious faith as equal competitors to his secular faith. A mis-directed and self-defeating argument therefore. The world needs yet another faith as much as it needs another SUV.

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On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry


Grieving for a Lost Century

Sadness is not easy to write about in a sustained way. It can quickly transform into either sentimentality or resentment. Sebastian Barry knows the rules of writing about sadness. There must be structure to contain its excesses. He uses a day by day diary of the memory of four wars and their accompanying deaths. It must have a point, a purpose. His purpose is preparation for imminent death by suicide of someone who has experienced all she is capable of in life. And it must be, magically perhaps, near universal in its concrete, unique details lest it deteriorate into mere history. Barry is the required magician who can find the general in the most personal.

Violence breeds, among much else, fear. Whether victim or victimiser, fear is a residue of harm done, harm experienced or harm avoided. Fear lasts far longer than the wounds of harm. Ireland is a land which from time to time has been full of fear. And even when they leave it, the Irish (and not just them but all emigrants) carry some of the fear with them. It then shows itself as regret and revenge, even after a lifetime elsewhere, even after generations. And revenge and regret generate betrayal, which creates yet more fear - in the betrayer as well as the betrayed - and therefore more violence. The cycle increases like the strength of a tropical storm as it careens across the ocean to America.

The old know the sorrow of violence and how it is passed on. They can see the hurricane of violence for what it is. But they have no one for whom their knowledge has meaning. Language necessary to tell about what they know does not exist. Their unbearable loneliness is not caused by an absence of others but by the presence of innumerable others who cannot understand the sorrow they have accumulated. Thus the authentic emotion of age is not sadness but despair.

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Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb


How to Read

Reading is therapy for chaos. Thinking can only make chaos obvious. Sex is merely a temporary distraction from chaos. Gluttony can be an effective remedy to chaos but has its unfortunate side effects. No, it is only reading that provides a lasting cure for the chaotic meaninglessness of life. Reading does not answer questions, it frames them so that chaos appears orderly. To expect more from reading is a sort of sacrilege: “Nothing is more vulgar than to have everything explained, including the things that are inexplicable.”

As the poetically named Prétextat Tach says, “We need meaning more than anything else.” Some of us will kill for it. All of us search for it. Writers write in order to read about the meaning they have created out of chaos. “Writing begins where speech leaves off, and a great mystery lies behind the passage from the unspeakable to the speakable. The written word takes over where the spoken word leaves off, and they do not overlap.” It is only the written word that satisfies the therapeutic need to connect things which are inherently independent. “What is text,” asks Prétextat, “if not gigantic verbal cartilage?”

But most people don’t really read properly. “There are a great many people who push sophistication to the point of reading without reading. They’re like frogmen, they go through books without absorbing a single drop of water.” They are unaware that reading is meant to change everything about them. What they lack is an awareness of the motivation of the writer, which is not communication but influence. “Faced with a shapeless, senseless universe, a writer is obliged to play the demiurge. Without the remarkable assistance of his pen, the world would never have been able to give shape to things, and the stories of men would always have been wide open, like some horrible madhouse.”

People idolise the god-like writer when they overlook his intent to dominate their existence. “Great writers have a direct and supernatural access to the lives of others.” This is only a talent by convention; actually “writers are obscene; if they were not, they would be accountants, or train conductors, or telephone operators; they would be respectable.” So writers have to be interrogated carefully - like Job demanding a response from God, but with even more intense persistence. The divine does not give up its secrets or its motivations, easily.

The real reader kills the God who provides meaning by exposing him for what he is, and humiliates him for the deceitful order he has given to the world. This is a reader who has grown up and left the illusions of childhood. He is the one who gets God to admit that “Love has no meaning, and that is why it is sacred... Love serves no purpose other than love.” Recognising this, the real reader becomes... well, God.

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Same Same by Peter Mendelsund
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Trap of Creative Ambition

The command to know oneself is one of those shibboleths of ancient philosophy that are taken as universally sound advice. But the obsessive drive to know oneself is a trap. Knowing oneself can become an ambition like any other: it absorbs the life that’s meant to be improved into itself and creates a prisoner who is at the mercy of the ambition. Even if the ambition in question is purely intellectual, the trap is set.

In fact all ambitions end up in the same sump of attempting to know oneself. The thematic core of the novel captures the common thread: “Become the best you.” This is the pervasive ethos of Freehold, the desert country and its Institute populated by creative geniuses in various fields from Brand Management and Financial Derivatives to Astrology and Architecture. Whatever their intellectual speciality, all end up pursuing some vision of themselves, that “ineffable, secret self.” The Institute is the ultimate self-help programme in an Apple-like campus.

The Institute runs on words, lots of words, and therefore lots of paper. It also provides “deliberation arenas, thought-huddles, and social pods” for the exchange of words among the residents. The Director of the Institute is very concerned to generate “ideas that are transmissible, scalable, and viable.” He wants “The PERFECT project and Discourse™. Relatable, marketable, profound, digestible, fun, fresh, smart…a masterful theorization of the Now.” This demands hard work from all the residents and “requires your complete buy-in. FULL bandwidth... End-to-end; ERROR-FREE channels. Proactivity. Actualization.” Words, of course, seem to have their own ideas and eventually gum up the works, literally and figuratively. Words can make you crazy; or mask the craziness already there. Wordspace is not meatspace, even if they do leak into one another.

The sci-fi (or fantasy, the genre is tough to pin down) gimmick Mendelsund employs to motivate the action is a Neal Stephenson-like reproductive facility, the Same Same Shop. The Same Same Shop can not only replicate anything from clothing to currency, it can repair and restore things as well. The technology of the Same Same Shop, whatever it is, seems to know the essence of the things brought to it for help. It, uncannily, understands their reality and is able to reconstruct this reality as needed. It even knows about the reality of words as unreal and self-referential. A sort of high-tech, post-modernist Kabbalah.

And if the Same Same Shop can fix things, why shouldn’t it fix people? Particularly people with burnt out minds who are bored with life, addicted to various substances, and unable to any longer function irl (‘in real life;’ it’s essential to understand Mendelsund’s blogspeak). Perhaps it might even fix the abuse of language that is rampant within the Institute, and that reflects the general banality of the culture which produced it. If only...

The real question is: Can the Same Same Shop do anything at all to help the creative luvvies at the BBC find themselves and come up with better programming on Saturday nights?

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The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hustling for Every Little Thing

Real power is the power to humiliate. Humiliation requires the participation of the victim. Participation in humiliation is what allows coercive society to exist. Armies, religions, prisons are examples notable not for their differences from what is ‘normal’, but rather for the norms they make obvious. To say it plainly: to be human is to be humiliated, including those who are in power, who are mostly men.

Children are humiliated as a matter of cultural routine. If they accustom themselves to it, they develop into good citizens. If they don’t, the intensity of humiliation is progressively increased. They become vagrants, addicts, and inmates... or prison guards. If they are women, there are career opportunities in the many mansions of the sex industry.

For the most humiliated, life is a constant hustle. To hustle is to humiliate oneself intentionally in order to survive. Hustling is the main form of participation in humiliation that takes place throughout society. But it is only practised at a professional level by those typically designated as criminal. Criminality is illegal hustling. It can look like haplessness, but really it’s just a transient position on the learning curve.

For the criminal, the world is not composed of other individuals but of one monolithic AUTHORITY which must be hustled against (or, more properly, with). AUTHORITY is simply ‘there.’ Most obviously in the quaintly named ‘justice system,’ but also in the increasingly trivial rules, procedures and prohibitions one becomes subject to on the slide into abyssal humiliation. There’s also one’s fellow hustlers to contend with, whose goal is to stay one rung above you on the ladder. Humiliation, like wealth, is always a relative thing.

Criminal hustling uses enormous amounts of energy. One’s competitive edge is difficult to maintain. Prison can be a welcome respite. Its humiliations are known and largely impersonal. Its hustles are relatively simple and low energy. In an environment of rigid routine, hustles can be planned and executed methodically. No need to ad lib or take inordinate risks. In prison, patience becomes a cardinal virtue.

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Telex from Cuba 
by 

Rachel Kushner (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Oct 01, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: american, favourites, caribbean 

Privilege: A Theory Inspired by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner has done an outstanding job, presenting an informed, intriguing, concise but nuanced explanation for the Cuban Revolution in a highly accomplished work of fiction. Her story, although it references all of these, doesn’t focus on politics, or ideology, or personalities. The dominant theme is privilege and how it manifests itself in its practice and in its demise. And like most good literature, the importance of this theme and the implicit analysis of it goes far beyond the specifics of Cuba and the United Fruit Company’s involvement in the country. Her story speaks for itself; but I would like to pay it a tribute by suggesting a more general interpretation.

Privilege is a form of power that requires a a particular kind of community in which to be exercised. Privilege exists in a world which is defined by explicit social and economic commitments among identifiable individuals. In turn, the privileged community must exist within a larger society which does not share its privileges. Although the privileged community may act benignly, even charitably, toward the rest of its surrounding society, its loyalty is always to itself. Thus, the meaning of privilege only becomes clear when there is a conflict between the interests of the privileged community and society. Community members will always act in the interests of fellow members. This is the operational definition of privilege.

Employees of multinational corporations are members of a privileged community. The degree of privilege enjoyed depends largely upon the importance of the company involved, not to the society in which it operates but rather to the government of that society which acts effectively as a business partner. This relationship between the multinational and the government may be obscured by the complex technical details of regulatory and other legal arrangements, but these are the substance of the contract negotiated between the two parties. And implicit in this contract is the degree of privilege enjoyed by multinational employees.

The existence of privileged corporate communities is universal. They exist in socialist as well as capitalist countries, in social democracies and dictatorships, in religious as well as secular societies. In this sense at least the world is corporate. It is organised and managed by privileged communities which are in more or less continuous negotiation with national governments. For a variety of reasons - continuity of leadership, commercial incentive, the availability of legal and technical skills, the reliability of personal progression, among others - the corporate privileged corporate community has a permanent advantage in all negotiations with government. 

The members of the privileged community rarely see themselves as privileged. They may perceive that their role in society is, say, one of increasing commercial efficiency or technological innovation (as in modern America) or of bringing the infrastructure of civilisation to less developed societies (as in the now-defunct British Empire), or one of promoting what is, to them, a manifestly superior culture (as with many current Chinese companies). Regardless of the diversity of self-image adopted by members of the privileged community, however, their common factor is the dedication to the interests of the community, to which they look for approval and reward.

Given its inherent negotiating superiority and internal stability, the only external requirement for the success of the privileged community is the reciprocal stability of the governmental system with which it negotiates. It is the system, not the individuals or the ideological commitments of parties or factions, which is critical. Everything remains negotiable as long as the system remains intact. In this, the interests of the privileged community and the government are exactly coincident. Consequently they will join forces whenever necessary to ensure that the ‘rules of the game’ remain unchanged. This can easily degenerate into overt corruption but need not for the arrangement to work ‘profitably’ for both parties.

This situation involving the interests of the government and the privileged community is both the primary obstacle to radical governmental action, and the primary stimulus to revolutionary upheaval. The American and French Revolutions, the various European civil conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century, indeed the American Civil War, among others are commonplace examples of the phenomenon. When the bond between privileged communities and governments is inadequate to any longer control the rest of society, revolution becomes inevitable. Governmental systems collapse and privileged communities disperse, to be replaced by a new system and a new privileged community. As one literary revolutionary, Kurt Vonnegut, was fond of saying: “And so it goes.”