A very mundane exceptionalism

Let’s condemn Israel, for sure, for its attacks on Gaza and on the aid flotilla but let’s not pretend that we’re surprised. We should be rightly shocked & outraged but we should not play the naif as if this kind of thing is unexpected. Any serious political analysis has got to get to grips with how the Israeli state, how the political leadership in Israel (and elsewhere, Egypt for example in its blockade of Gaza), has swung so far to the right, become so intoxicated by military power, has become so anti-democratic, that the ideology of ‘exceptionalism’ has become normalised. (Let’s recall the vital debates about the corruption of republican and democratic virtue by the imperial state). And there isn’t a single regime in the Middle East, including in Turkey, and no imperial state in the west which if not actively anti-democratic itself is not also in collusion with anti-democratic politics.

It is really quite revolting to hear Erdogan or Ahmedinajad or Mubarak or Hamas or Respect on the one hand or Obama or Cameron or Sarkozy or NATO on the other hand attempting to make political capital out of this incident. In the case of the former they are actively suppressive of democratic politics on a massive scale, and the latter are actively complicit in the suppression of democratic politics on a massive scale throughout the empire.

“I am hurt.
A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone, and hath nothing?”
Romeo and Juliet Act 3 Scene 1- Mercutio

Why also, we should ask, despite the hand-wringing and the anguished appeals for respect of international law (whatever that is) does no one really expect any effective action to constrain let alone bring to democratic account Israel’s state terrorism ? We call for international action but deep down – actually not even deep down, just barely below the surface – we know that we’re pissing in the wind. I think that the humanitarian Left is, and has been for decades, delusional. Delusional in the sense that despite the manifest failure of moral appeals, of normatively governed efforts to regulate international relations and global politics, the humanitarian Left nevertheless falls back on the same old moral strictures about political action. As a fellow travelling Cassandra (though never paid up member) of the humanitarian Left, I’ve got to say the self-delusion is so pervasive that it has rendered the humanitarian Left quite irrelevant to imperial power. That power disdains and leaves us with nothing. The Palestinians are still caged. The refugees of ’48, ’67, ’82, of Oslo and on are still refugees. Israeli democrats (let’s not even mention socialists) become fewer and fewer, weaker and weaker. Exiles become more and more numerous, hope more and more forlorn. And all we can do is declare, again, ‘what an outrage !’, ‘how could they !’

Gideon Levy is, as usual, on to something. As was Mercutio,

TYBALT under ROMEO’s arm stabs MERCUTIO, and flies with his followers

MERCUTIO
I am hurt.
A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone, and hath nothing?

BENVOLIO
What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO
Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, ’tis enough.
Where is my page? Go, villain, fetch a surgeon.

Exit Page

ROMEO
Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO
No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church-door; but ’tis enough,’twill serve: ask for
me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I
am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’
both your houses! ‘Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a
cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a
rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of
arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I
was hurt under your arm.

ROMEO
I thought all for the best.

[This comment was originally written in June 2010 under the title “A plague o’ both your houses”]

Lectures on ethics

No doubt coincidental but no less telling for that, the day that Larry Flynt publisher of Hustler and feudal, Wahabbi fundamentalist, mysogenist, tyrant Al-Waleed bin Talal Al-Saud both call into question the integrity and ethics of Murdoch’s empire, he finally endorses the resignation of dirty executives and dropping the BskyB bid, as well as ‘apologising’ to the family of Millie Dowler. It is a measure of the sheer depravity of Murdoch that Flynt and Al-Saud are able to claim the moral high ground from which to lecture him on ethics. (Actually Flynt strikes me as a rather honest and open character : he’s a pornographer and says so).

By contrast you can’t help appreciating the prescience and rapier-like critique of the terminally-ill Dennis Potter forewarning the corrosive and corrupting effect of Murdoch and corporate commercial news media. In this interview, Potter already well-alert to the anti-democratic mass media and painfully exhibiting the cancer which News Corps represents (his own pancreatic cancer he named ‘Rupert’), gave one the most powerful pieces of television that I have seen. See the seven excerpts of Dennis Potter’s last confession (with Melvyn Bragg) in 1994.

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 1

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 2

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 3

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 4

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 5

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 6

Dennis Potter, Last Interview, Part 7

When owners of the means of mental production lecture other owners of the means of mental production on ethics we know that we’ve reached rock bottom. If we need lectures from anyone on ethics and the ‘media’, then let’s not waste time with Flynt, Al-Saud, Murdoch, Cameron and co, and spare time and after time for Dennis Potter.

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos – to sleep or to dream ?

Goya’s etchings from 1799, to which he gave the name Los Caprichos or caprices –  “sudden changes or turn of the mind without apparent or adequate motive; a desire or opinion arbitrarily or fantastically formed; a freak, whim, mere fancy” (OED) – is matched in its disturbing (magical) realism only by his equally famous post-Napoleonic etchings Los desastres de la guerra, the disasters of war.  The long-lived Francisco Goya’s two series of etchings are not so much acid commentaries on an age so much as reflections of the struggles of an age in which the claims of Reason over varieties of supernaturalism were becoming more acute. In fact Goya’s own biography tells of the evolution of an artistic talent and intellect from accomplished worker to privileged patrons to a radical social-political critic. Between the fin de siecle Los Caprichos and the Los desastres de la guerra (created in the decade following the expulsion of Napoleonic forces from the Iberian peninsula, 1810-1820) can be seen the promise of Reason for the emancipation of human kind and its simultaneous enslavement and deepening of barbarism. This relationship between Reason and barbarism is, for me, the defining feature of our own age and human condition.

And it is Goya’s 43rd etching in Los Caprichos series ‘El sueno de la razon produce monstruos’ (The sleep of reason produces monsters) which expresses best the puzzle and paradox of modernity.  It is itself a paradoxical plea : Either, when reason sleeps, is not alert, is not consciously applied, is not followed then shall monsters, nightmares, horrors, disasters, and barbarisms follow. It is reason which will free us, safeguard us, ensure our well being. Or, when sueno is understood (and translated) not as ‘sleep’ but as ‘dream’ as “a vision of the fancy voluntarily or consciously indulged in when awake” or “an ideal or aspiration” (OED again) – thus, the dream of reason produces monsters – we are confronted by Reason’s dispiriting opposite : It is the seductive dream of Reason’s powers and virtues which releases the monsters, day-light terrors, horrors, disasters, and barbarisms.

En fin, emancipation and/or barbarism : both, whichever way we twist and turn it seems, the consequence of the sueno de la razon.

A little over a century after Goya’s death (1828) Adorno and Horkheimer concur with this paradox of modernity in their Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944) : “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”

Do marxist writers have an obligation to write well ?

Whatever sympathies one has for marxist critiques of the world, it only takes one look at, say, Capital and Class to realise how unutterably dull and soulless marxisms can be. It is tedious and smug in equal measure, but it shouldn’t be. It seems to take the worst traditions of autistic political economy (hardly leavened by ‘critique’) and re-writes them with the unctuous prolix of a zealot. Somehow it makes medieval scholasticism look rather worldly and pragmatic in comparison.

However, we’re told that “Since 1977 Capital & Class has been the main, peer-reviewed, independent source for a Marxist critique of global capitalism.” At least in that faint praise perhaps we have the kernel of an explanation for the decline of marxism. If this is the best on offer we’re well and truly screwed. No doubt it is independent, by which one assumes is meant independent from any marxist party or particular organisation’s doctrine. And no doubt it is peer-reviewed, where the reviewing peers are invariably not so much critics as disciplining hermeneuts.  But no doubt it remains dull as ditch water.

So after half a dozen years of not having read Capital and Class, this renewed attempt to re-engage with the soi-disant “pioneer[s of] key debates,” I’m left with the same disappointed sigh with which I closed Capital and Class six years ago.

Home

Welcome to Morfoubey, an irregular blog of reflection and compilations loosely revolving around the themes of enlightenment and the production of nightmares.