Calimocho: On the Politics of Wine and Cola

 Andy Warhol: Coca-Cola (3), 1962

Probably the most powerful argument for choosing a cool can of Coke over a fine glass of wine remains that made by Andy Warhol and it's primarily a cultural-political argument tied to American consumerism, rather than one concerning taste (in either sense of the word) or sobriety:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."   

- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, (Harcourt, 1975)

This is undeniably true and one senses something of this same patriotism and ironic egalitarianism of the market place - one might almost call it Coca-Cola communism - born of a New World dislike for Old World snobbery, in George Costanza's equally robust defence of Pepsi.

Reminded by Elaine that it's customary for guests to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party, George informs her that he doesn't even drink wine - he drinks Pepsi. When Elaine scornfully tells him that he can't bring Pepsi to a gathering of grown-ups, George snorts: "You telling me that wine is better than Pepsi? Huh, no way wine is better than Pepsi."

Even Jerry's attempt to intervene by telling his outraged friend that the fabric of society is very complex and that one has to conform to all manner of customs and conventions, fails to placate George on this point. Later, in the car driving to the party, George asks: "What are we Europeans with the Beaujolais and the Chardonnay ...?" 

Still, none of this serves to explain Jeremy's discomfort at ordering a bottle of Barolo when on a date in an episode of Peep Show. He's obviously put off by the price (£45), but does he really think that wine is less delicious than hot chocolate or Coke? If so, this simply makes him juvenile rather than American does it not?    

Notes:

See Seinfeld, 'The Dinner Party', episode 13, season 5 (1994) and Peep Show, 'Burgling', episode 1, series 5 (2008). 

The Handmaid's Tale

Cover to first hardback edition
(McCelland and Stewart, 1985)

I read The Handmaid's Tale full of high hopes and great expectations, aware of the critical status of this novel and sympathetic to any literary attempt to warn against authoritarian states - particularly ones underpinned by religious fundamentalism. But, I have to say, I found it disappointing.

Atwood rather cleverly combines some of the queer gothic elements of The Scarlet Letter with those twentieth century classics of dystopian fiction Brave New World and 1984. But whereas the latter, for example, challenges us to imagine a future in which a boot stamps on a human face forever, The Handmaid's Tale asks us to believe in a time when power nakedly manifests itself over an illicit game of Scrabble.

This might be making a point about the often banal and domestic character of evil, but, I must confess, I found it ludicrous. And, unfortunately, there were other things which served only to undermine the seriousness and the horror of the story. One should wince at the publicly displayed bodies of executed prisoners, but not at the clunkiness of dialogue exchanged between characters - even when spoken in the Latin that both Luke and the Commander for some peculiar reason had a penchant for.

I also think we could have done without the puns and without Nick, the chauffeur-lover, playing an almost Lawrentian role in the book. As for the 'Historical Notes' which Atwood attaches as an afterword, these too only serve to weaken the power of the novel which ends with an otherwise very memorable and moving last line: "And so I step, into the darkness within; or else the light."

Again, Atwood might be trying to make a (feminist) point about the manner in which an authentic female voice speaking its own experiences and memories is eventually transcribed, edited, and absorbed into an academic world (i.e. a system of power and privilege) still controlled by pricks such as Professor Pieixoto. But I agree entirely with Joyce Carol Oates who comments on the deflating effect of this heavily ironic coda:

"The appendix makes of the novel an astute, provocative social commentary, where its absence would have made the novel an abiding work of art ending with Offred's hopeful voice ..."     

Sometimes, as a writer, you just gotta know when to shut-up. And, ultimately, literature's not about scoring easy points or making lame jokes.  


Note: Joyce Carol Oates was writing in a piece entitled 'Margaret Atwood's Tale', in The New York Review of Books (Nov 2, 2006). Those interested in reading her article in full should click here.

From the Barbary Wars to the War on Terror

Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat (1804), by Dennis Malone Carter  Source: Naval Historical Center, Dept. of the Navy, Washington Many people seem to believe that the violent struggle between America and the Islamic world began on that fateful day in September, 2001. But, as a matter of fact, there's a crucial historical context to the present conflict which predates 9/11.

Indeed, whilst some commentators argue that the US inadvertently helped to create IS due to its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, it's actually more accurate to say that the Arab-Muslim world has determined (and provoked) US armed foreign policy from the very beginning. To understand why this is so, it's necessary to look back to the time of the so-called Barbary Wars at the beginning of the 19th century ...  Deprived of Royal Navy protection following victory in the War of Independence, American merchant shipping became increasingly vulnerable to the attentions of those powers and pirates who controlled the seas along the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Not only were cargoes looted, but crews and passengers were kidnapped and either held for ransom, or sold into slavery. Thus, as early as the 1780s, America was obliged either to take military action, or submit to Arab aggression and the payment of ever-increasing sums of protection money, or 'tribute' as it was known.  Rightly, I believe, under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the US decided it had to fight. For not only is it mistaken and shameful to give into extortion, but there were also terrible reports at the time concerning the mistreatment of captured American citizens. And so a fleet was constructed and a new, permanent force of marines assembled.  Of course, Jefferson was primarily keen to secure American access to free trade routes and was not particularly interested in fighting a holy war or crusade against the Muslim states per se. However, as Christopher Hitchens points out, he must surely have remembered what he was told in 1785 when he and John Adams met with Tripoli's ambassador to London, Abd Al-Rahman: demanding to know by what right the Barbary states behaved as they did towards a newly born secular republic which had no quarrel with the Arab-Muslim world, they were informed that God gave them this authority and that it was written in the Quran that they were free to enslave or murder infidels.           Faced with such religious mania and intransigence, conflict was unavoidable. And so, between 1801 and 1805, was fought the first Barbary War. This was followed by a second skirmish over the same issues, directed by James Madison, in 1815. American victory not only meant the US no longer had to pay a percentage of its GNP to rogue states, it also helped bring about an end to piracy in the region which obviously benefited many other nations, including the UK. We should be grateful, therefore, for the courage of US marines on the shores of Tripoli two centuries ago. And we should be grateful that America is still prepared to step up when needs be and send its servicemen and women into battle.

Put on a Little Makeup ...

One of the things that I find a joy to watch is a young woman putting on her makeup in the morning whilst on the tube and, presumably, on her way to work; particularly when she does so with real concern and concentration and completely oblivious to the presence of her fellow passengers. 

For me, there's always something moving and magical about seeing a woman perform an otherwise private function in public; creating a little space and time for herself and about herself in a busy world with nothing more than foundation, blusher, mascara, and lipstick.

One invariably thinks of what Baudelaire wrote on the female use of cosmetics:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accompanying a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

                                                                                                                   
- Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press Ltd., 1995), p. 33. 

Happy to Live in a Soulless World

 Cover art for Jean Baudrillard's Carnival and Cannibal 

(Seagull Books, 2010)

According to Roger Sandall, Disneyfication is the fourth and final stage of what he terms designer tribalism; the way in which a primitive, often savage but nonetheless authentic culture is finally reduced to the level of puerility within the Romantic imagination.

I have no arguments with this, but what Sandall doesn't seem to recognise is that the West has ruthlessly subjected its own culture and history to a similar process - something that Baudrillard was at pains to point out in a late essay entitled Carnival and Cannibal. 

Thus, whilst it's true that the West has obliged non-Western peoples the world over to accept modernity and wear a smiley white face, so too do we figure in this grotesque masquerade, effectively having carnivalized and cannibalized ourselves long before exporting such practices globally. 

The fact is, modernity spares no one: it's a great collective spectacle and swindle wherein "multiracial civilization is merely a trompe-l'oeil universe in which all particularities of race, sex and culture can be said to have been falsified to the point of being parodies of themselves". 

In other words, Western civilization has not triumphed - or, if it has, it has triumphed at the cost of its own soul. Still, this may not be a bad thing ... a soulless future and a disenchanted world may yet be the most beautiful (in its indifference, its irony, and its seductive emptiness). 

And if you think you might prefer to live instead in a world of fundamental values and absolute certainty, of sincerity and sovereignty, authenticity and enthusiasm, then I suggest you pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

Notes

Roger Sandall writes about Disneyfication and the other three stages of Noble Savagery in an Appendix to The Culture Cult, (Westview Press, 2001), pp. 179-81.

Baudrillard's essay, Carnival and Cannibal, is translated by Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2010). The line quoted from is on p. 9.  

These are a Few of My Favourite Things: Sitcoms

Image via http://www.middlechildmade.com/shop/i-love-sitcoms/

I have spoken elsewhere on the political and philosophical importance of lists, but we should not overlook the pleasure aspect: quite simply, lists make happy; they are fun to write and fun to read.

So, here's a list of my thirteen favourite sitcoms - assembled not in order of preference nor following a critical assessment of humourous value, but alphabetically by series title. For compiling lists should not be simply another excuse to exercise judgement and construct hierarchies. I love all of these shows, not equally, but in any order that one might care to watch them and the only logic that links them is the fact that they have continually given joy (perhaps more joy than anything else).

I am not of the view that comedy serves some kind of radical function; I certainly don't think we can simply laugh all our worries or problems away. But I do think it's a higher form than tragedy.

Note that I have decided to exclude any animated shows - otherwise The Simpsons would certainly be on this list. 

Bilko (The Phil Silvers Show)

Cheers

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Hancock's Half-Hour

Extras
Father Ted
I'm Alan Partridge

Man About the House

Peep Show

Rhoda

Rising Damp

Seinfeld

Thirty Rock 

La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.

The Culture Cult

Westview Press (2001) 

The fact that this is a badly written and bad tempered book with a strangely dated frame of reference, lacking both philosophical rigour and insight, certainly detracts from but doesn't entirely negate the fact that it's an interesting study on what has once more become a vital question - namely, that of culture and civilization. Or, rather, culture contra civilization.

Roger Sandall - a former lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney - is not a man who likes to leave anyone in any doubt where he stands. In The Culture Cult he offers an unambiguous critique of romantic primitivism and an unapologetic defence of modernity and Western civilization. He also analyses how designer tribalism is used to undermine the values and achievements of the latter by people who, for one reason or another, choose to reject civil society, science, and secularism.

For those who often violently oppose corrupt (i.e. complex) modernity in favour of pre-modern ways of life - such as radical Islamists, for example - human rights, healthcare, and education are besides the point. They insist on the moral superiority of their traditions and beliefs and offer a fictionalized account of the past to justify this insistence. Depressingly - and disastrously - as members of religious and/or ethnic minorities who have migrated to the West, they are encouraged (often by those who mean well) to effectively lead separate lives based on practices and views that are at irreconcilably at odds with the world around them and which thus keep them trapped in poverty, superstition, and ignorance. This often leads to resentment, criminal behaviour and, ultimately, opens a pathway to extremism. 

Sandall regards everything associated with noble savagery and the culture cult as bad news. And he is at pains to remind us that most traditional cultures "feature domestic oppression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints", concluding that if you want to live a free and full life then it might be worth your while defending civilization - not stone age stupidity or a sentimental ideal of Otherness.

Remember: the life of the Maasai warrior who drinks fresh blood from the neck of a cow, is no more noble, authentic, or spiritually enriched, than the life of an American tourist sipping a can of Coke.  

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things: Films

I have spoken elsewhere on the political and philosophical importance of lists, but we should not overlook the pleasure aspect: quite simply, lists make happy; they are fun to write and fun to read.

So, here's a list of my favourite films - assembled not in order of preference nor following a critical assessment of cinematic value, but alphabetically by title. For compiling lists should not be simply another excuse to exercise judgement and construct hierarchies. I love all of these films, not equally, but in any order that one might care to view them and the only logic that links them is the fact that they have continually given amorous pleasure. 

Two final points to note: Firstly, I've selected only a single film by any one director. Obviously I could list several by those directors of whom I am especially fond, but I didn't want to do that. Secondly, I have only selected English language films made in the US or UK, even though there are obviously foreign language movies that I love; perhaps I'll make a separate list of these at another time.

Annie Hall, (dir. Woody Allen, 1977)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, (dir. George Roy Hill, 1969)

Carry on Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966)

Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999)

Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Housesitter (dir. Frank Oz, 1992)

My Cousin Vinnie (dir. Jonathan Lynn, 1992)

Paper Moon (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

Please Sir! (dir. Mark Stuart, 1971) 

Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Sons of the Desert (dir. William A. Seiter, 1933)

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (dir. Sergio Leone, 1966) 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brody (dir. Ronald Neame, 1969)

The Thirty-Nine Steps, (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) 

Twins (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1988)  

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.