Polite Vomit
Norwegian airline Widerøe accept the potential oral effluent of their customers with polite and polished ease. One side of the complementary vomit bag carries the inscription “uff da… (ooops…)” while the other one conveys the best wishes of the airline: “god bedring! (get well soon!)”. Isn’t that nice?!
“I am here, and there is nothing to say.” “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” These two quotes are, respectively, the first and one of the first sentences of John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing 1. Usually, to speak and say nothing is not appreciated by the listener, the speech will be categorized as waffle, a waste of time. And rightfully so! There is, however, such an abundance of empty utterances that actually aim at – but horribly miss – meaningful communication that, from time to time, you long for the willful undermining of language, the brave probings of nonsense.
These are the days of the COP15 summit and more or less everyone is busy stating their views of a better world. There are a lot of professional opinion makers in the fray. Prominent among them, Naomi Klein yesterday contributed with the following commentary in her Memo to Danes: Even You Cannot Control This Summit: “In the morning demonstrators are going to march to the Bella Center to demand real solutions to the climate crisis, not the fuzzy math and carbon trading on offer inside.”
Carbon trading might be a legitimate means for handling the current problems, it might be the contrary, but to simply oppose “real solutions” to “fuzzy math and carbon trading” is downright silly. Why is math an unreal tool to the task? One should think that mathematics would be a necessary and very real element in fighting climate change. What she means, of course, is that the official negotiators have trouble agreeing on the math and that carbon trading is an unacceptable solution. But sadly, the math seems equally fuzzy at Klimaforum09, and carbon trading is, supposedly, a manifestly more real solution than “real solutions.”
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A quick post to share a joke. Well not really a joke, more of an acid wit. French philosopher Alain Badiou has been called many things during his long and lustrous life, a lot of them bad. Some people seem to insist, for example, that the man is anti-Semite. Zizek lovingly repeats that he and Badiou are both Stalinists (Badiou, of course, is Maoist). I seem to remember that, not too long ago, a Danish journalist recounting French contemporary political thinking called him dangerous and mad. Ah, well… “A beloved child has many names” as we say in Denmark. But to call Badiou names is, I think, a most marvelous thing. Not that he deserves it, but because he tends to answer these preposterous accusations with such humorous force as to make any stand up comedian blush with envy.
I just now stumbled upon the following gem of an aggressive defense:
“J’aime les grandes mĂ©taphores venues de la religion : Miracle, Grâce, Salut, Corps Glorieux, Conversion… On a Ă©videmment conclu de ce goĂ»t que ma philosophie Ă©tait un christianisme dĂ©guisĂ©. Le livre sur saint Paul que j’ai publiĂ© en 1997 aux PUF n’a pas arrangĂ© les choses. Ă€ tout prendre, j’aime mieux ĂŞtre un athĂ©e rĂ©volutionnaire cachĂ© sous une langue religieuse qu’un “dĂ©mocrate” occidental persĂ©cuteur de musulman(e)s dĂ©guisĂ© en fĂ©ministe laĂŻque.” (Baidou: Second manifeste pour la philosophie note 4)
In case your French is a bit rusty, here is a rusty translation:
“I love the great religious metaphors: Miracle, Grace, Salvation, Glorious Body, Conversion… Obviously, someone concluded from this preference that my philosophy was disguised christianity. The book on Saint Paul, which I published in 1997 at PUF, didn’t help the matter. All considered, I would rather be a revolutionary atheist hidden behind a religious vernacular than an occidental “democrat” persecuting muslims disguised as a secular feminist.”
You almost want to high-five your buddy and chest bump your pal shouting “Snap! Them mo-fo’s got pwned!,” don’t you?
“We the people” is a weird constellation. Is the plural subsumed under the singular or is it the other way around? Who is “We” and what is a people? Well in the case of “We the people,” “We” are the “people” of the United States, but again what does this entail? This question has no doubt been scrutinized endlessly by jurists and philosophers and our goal here is not to attempt what better men and women have already achieved. It is simply to draw attention to an unsettling frequency of similar statements in current political discourse and the problematic consequences thereof.
Let us begin at home. At their main annual convention this summer, leader of Danish People’s Party Pia Kjærsgaard said something like the following: “So while the potential maximum penalty for a crime has maybe doubled, the actually passed sentences have only augmented slightly. We will not stand for this. The judges are not the rulers of this country!” As well as crying out for mandatory minimums, this angry minx is decreeing the power of “We” over the power of the judges. “We the people” may be sovereign in American law but even the Americans try to uphold the seperation of powers as described by Montesquieu. Kjærsgaard is actually calling for direct popular control of the judiciary branch. “We the people shall not accept delicate judicial treatment of those who dare defy our laws.”
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In spite of what the title might evoke in the geeky mind, this is not an entry about Baudelaire. No, it is about popular culture and the references, or correspondences, that are planted in popular culture. All viewers of FOX’s tv show House will have noticed that he used to live in no 221B, which, of course, is a reference to Sherlock Holmes who lived in 221B Baker Street. Naturally, there are plenty more correspondences between the good doctor House and the wise and wicked Sherlock Holmes, because they are the same character! Wilson is Watson, especially in that he is more ‘what?’ than ‘will’, House and Holmes both have a drug addiction, and they both tend to be arrogant in a slightly funny manner, etc. We don’t need to go further down that road and I once wrote an entry about the comedic positions of the different characters (I wrote it in Danish, but here you go).
The one thing I wanted to point out today is the tiny reference made to Monty Python in the recent episode 9 of the 6th season:
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On the subject of this blog’s last defilement of a perfectly nice blank screen, The importance of being Elvis, a friend remarked that the title bore a bit of the Elvis odour itself. She claimed that this particular critique of intellectual commentary was in and by itself just another bit of pseudo-intellectual commentary. And of course she is right!
As has already been stated on this page – it’s remarkable how long a webpage really is – bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory. Blogs are the very sanctuaries of commentary, it is where commentary goes when it is no longer wanted in respectable company, which is why blogs are usually just havens for washed up intellectual waste and futile observations of abundant banality.
So why more or less consciously commit the sin you are condemning? Why throw all personal pride and integrity overboard and just plow right through the known courteous seas? Because it feels so good! Bloggery as well as commentary are generally examples of what we might call rhetorical masturbation and rhetorical masturbation, as we have all learnt in our early years, makes you blind. Well, maybe you don’t really loose your eyesight but you do tend to lean back a bit and close your eyes with the sheer pleasure of it.
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Something which has really gotten my goat lately is intellectual commentary. There are certainly innumerable culprits within this field of pseudo-intellectual guff but two among them annoy me on a daily basis: Christopher Hitchens and Slavoj Zizek.
Let us begin with the anti-theist. Hitchens is a very educated man. He went to Oxford, which is often mentioned when he is introduced before going on stage. But this is another thing: Why is it important that the man went to Oxford?! It is without a doubt a good school, but in no way is it a guarantee of the man’s competence. The snobbery of it! I know plenty of people who went to La Sorbonne. I see no greater assembly of geniuses there than anywhere else and yet it is mentioned with a certain awe, as if it were the proof of a mind as sharp as a surgical laser. Why can’t we simply accept that it is not the teaching which makes the thinker, but the studying.
Hitchens probably did a fair deal of studying. He seems to be a well-read man. But this also seems to be his only intellectual strength. If you listen to his speeches, interviews or debates or you actually read his texts you might notice that he is all reference and no analysis. He refers to literary quotes and the experiences of his own wicked self or those of others. His argument is thus based on the authority of texts or the allusion to “real life”.
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Unless mine eyes deceive me, it has been almost three months since the last contribution to this bloggery manifestation of ennui. This is not because I have been going gently into that languid light of laziness, oh no! There was a visit from Paris, there was Christmas, there was a visit to Paris, I have done a couple of translations, and, finally, I applied for a PhD, which does take a bit of time. Another reason for my neglect of this reticular cultivation of the ego via its eternal written affirmation is that I got a bit bored with my attempts at rendering certain theoretical problems in bloggish. Bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory.
We therefore turn to the unbearable lightness of being sick. I am in such a state of illness right now, which, of course, is the reason for my choice of subject matter. It is not that I am really seriously sick, it is more that I am not at all well… Why, oh why must it be this way? A question which the afflicted tend to ask the room that contains them, most of them without expecting an answer. I, however, am a man of science! If God has chosen to punish me, I want him down here to tell me why, God dammit! But, since God is a very domestic animal with no great love of communication, I will have to invent my own unholy explanation. This, my invention, has three factors: The seed, the fun and the exercise.
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21
Mar 09
Anything but a fatal blow (usually) requires a ready defense
As a last installment (promised!) in our whole “commentary on the spectacular horrors of commentary”-debacle (now a trilogy with parts one and two already out) we should take a quick look at the ground values, not of bloggery as such, but of this our own particular verbal version of loose-stooled effluent. And as the greek word in the header (to the right of the backslash, not the hebrew one to the left) cries out in an embarrassingly high brow fashion, there is only one ground value: War!
So, the idea of this fecal accumulation was to have a place through which to channel the pile of bile that rises within us all when encountering that which is too high, too low, too in the middle, as well as that which just generally rubs us the wrong way.
An example: When some semi-celeb on the front page of a wholly disgraceful newspaper states “I am good in bed”, you must be made of sturdier stuff than me to avoid shaking your fists at the world, shouting insults and death threats at all who would even think of finding such a journalistic abomination worthy of print. Another one: The former princess Alexandra (Denmark), once visited a very hot country, somewhere with elephants, I forget… A photo of this young lady in a sweat stained t-shirt appeared on the front page of one of the weekly attacks on the minds of the already challenged with the following title “The Princess’ Hot Flashes”. I mean, really!
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