Zen Fascism on the London Underground (Don't Be Kind - Be Cruel!)

Toby Triumph and one of his posters produced for 

Transport for London's #TravelKind campaign 

tobytriumph.com

 

 

I. 

 

Transport for London is the local government body with a multi-billion pound budget responsible for most aspects of the capital's transport network. 

 

The management board is appointed by the Chair (and Mayor of London) Sadiq Khan - or, as he doubtless now likes to be referred to, Sir Sadiq Khan [1]. It's the board's job to ensure Khan's transport strategy is implemented, whilst a Commisioner and several chief officers oversee day-to-day operations.

 

TfL likes to promote a caring corporate identity concerned with promoting and protecting various rights and ensuring that their customers (i.e., passengers) eat healthily (in 2019 Khan introduced restrictions on the advertising of foods and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar). 

 

Some would describe this as a form of wokeness, but coming as I do from a punk background indebted to the Dead Kennedys, I prefer the term zen fascism [2].    

 

 

II. 

On 13 November 2017, TfL launched a new campaign - #TravelKind - which encouraged customers (i.e. passengers) on trains and buses to consider others and help make public transport a more enjoyable experience for everyone. 

 

The campaign is still running today and includes a series of posters designed by the illustrator Toby Triumph; a hippie originally from North Yorkshire, but who now spends his time betweeen London and New York. 

 

Working with the wonderful guys at the advertising agency VCCP [3], Triumph produced nine posters for use across the TfL network, all designed in his colourful 1960s and early '70s influenced style: smiley faces, peace signs, rainbows, etc.

 

Obviously, I'm not a fan: nor of TfL; nor of VCCP; nor of Sadiq Khan; nor of Toby Triumph; nor of hippie idealism; nor of corporate wokeism; nor of zen fascism. 

 

Indeed, one is almost tempted to channel the spirit of '68 and put a big black X through the injunction BE KIND on the poster that hangs at a nearby bus stop and replace it with the words SOYONS CRUELS! [4].   

 

Notes

 

[1] Khan was awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours List (2025) in recognition of his achievements and extraordinary service. Whether he deserved such - and whether he should have accepted such (and thereby open himself up to the charge of gross hypocrisy) - is debatable.

 

[2] The phrase - Zen fascist - is used in the band's debut single 'California Über Alles' (Alternative Tentacles, 1979) and is one that I have incorporated in several posts on Torpedo the Ark. 

      What Jello Biafra says of Jerry Brown I think we can also say of Sadiq Khan; he too is a left-leaning moral authoritarian who enjoys exercising power just a little too much, whilst insisting that all Londoners wear a happy face and share his vision of a diverse multicultural, multi-ethnic, net-zero city. To play the song, click here.   

       

[3] Founded in 2002, VCCP describe themselves as a global integrated communications agency that creates innovative and exciting advertising designed to transform brands. Their founding principles include being happy and unprecious.

 

[4] Soyons cruels! was a slogan painted on the walls of the Sorbonne during the student uprisings in Paris, in May 1968. 

      This might seem an outrageous and offensive statement to many people today. However, if you remember your Nietzsche and Foucault - and know something of the politics of the period, infused with the ideas of the Situationists - then the injunction takes on a certain philosophical character.

      James Miller suggests some interesting readings of what being cruel might mean in practice in his essay 'Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty', in Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sage Publications, August 1990), pp. 470-491. Click here to access on JSTOR.

 

 

Reconsidering the New Philosophers

BHL: king of the nouveaux philosophes 

 Photo: Corbis / Richard Melloul

Les nouveaux philosophes are members of a generation rather than a school or group of French thinkers who came to prominence in the 1970s and include Bernard Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, and Pascal Bruckner. 

If they decisively rejected Marx on the one hand, they had little time for Nietzsche on the other - or, indeed, for any writers whose work all-too-conveniently lends itself to non-democratic systems of power and authority. Politically, they can thus be described as neo-liberals who unashamedly subscribe to the ideals of the Enlightenment.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, Deleuze hated them. Indeed, in a famous text dated 5 June 1977 and given away free in bookstores in an attempt to counter the growing popularity of the New Philosophers, he claimed their thought was entirely devoid of real ideas, even if full of puffed-up concepts and large egos: 

"This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary development." [139-40]

The reason for their success, Deleuze explained, was because the New Philosophers were media-savvy and  understood how to market themselves and their works in a brilliant fashion. They effectively turned themselves into a brand and theory into a form of journalism or a series of soundbites perfect for TV. And this, says Deleuze, is conformist to the highest degree and marks a humiliating submission of thought.       

For Deleuze, the New Philosophers pissed on the events of May 68 and declared revolution - which is only another word for vital creativity - impossible; where once a little breeze was blowing, now there was a closed window:

"This is the total negation of politics and experiment ... the New Philosophers incarnate the disease that is trying to stifle all that. There is nothing alive in their work, but they will have fulfilled their function if they can occupy centre stage long enough to give whatever is creative the kiss of death." [147]

Deleuze has one more problem with the New Philosophers apart from the fact that they are TV-buffoons and their work is, in his view, shit. And that is that their humanism is overtly moral in tone and feeds off the suffering of others:

"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function ... But there would never have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity." [144-45]

Now, to be fair, I think Deleuze makes some valid points here and raises important concerns. Whenever one sees BHL, for example, interviewed on TV looking like a playboy intellectual and pleading the case for humanitarian intervention whilst promoting his latest book, one does feel a little creeped out.

Having said that, however, I can't help feeling that the New Philosophers do have import and that André Glucksmann's book Les maitres penseurs (1977) posed a crucial question: How had he, like many others of his generation, been so prone to murderous political fantasies and what role did texts by some of the great thinkers of philosophy play in this? As James Miller points out:

"Whatever its other merits, Glucksmann's book was a trenchant piece of self-criticism. The totalitarian impulse, as he stressed, was not something external, to be smugly denounced as it appeared in others; rather, this impulse affected everyone. Each of us was 'dual', caught in the snares of power, and prey to the temptation to abuse it. And 'if one takes account of this internal division', he concluded, 'it becomes impossible to imagine a single, ultimate revolution ...'"

Obviously such thinking infuriated Deleuze, but Foucault, however, was far more sympathetic and in a review of Glucksmann's book he praised the younger thinker and conceded that the revolutionary ideal itself needed to be questioned - be it in its Marxist or Dionysian form. Without explicitly saying so, Foucault was ratifying Glucksmann's move away from Maoism towards liberalism and, by so doing, furthering a philosophical and political rift between himself and Deleuze.

This took intellectual courage and integrity on Foucault's part I think. And, also, looking back from where we find ourselves today, it was the right thing to have done and not just a brave and honest move. In the final years of his life, Foucault helped inspire a new style of political conduct and commitment (acute, but cautious). André Glucksmann rightly praised him after his death in 1984 for breaking with the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-garde.

This is something we have all had to learn to do ...           


Notes

The interview with Gilles Deleuze from which I quote - 'On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem)' - can be found in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Semiotext(e), 2006). 

The passage from James Miller is taken from The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 296.