Simon Schama Versus Rod Liddle

A furious Simon Schama finger-points at Rod Liddle on BBC's Question Time 

(15 Oct 2015) and tells him to stick to writing his hack journalism 

and turn his "suburban face from the plight of the miserable". 

I've no reason to dislike the historian and art critic Simon Schama: he's clever, good-looking, cosmopolitan, and compassionate; he's even born on the same day as me (13 Feb). But in his recent clash on the BBC's Question Time with Rod Liddle, Schama did reveal a side of himself that is perhaps not quite so admirable or attractive; a proneness to dismiss those who don't share his moral and sentimental humanism on the subject of Syrian refugees as suburban.  

It is, of course, a term of disparagement with a long and unedifying history amongst English intellectuals; one that is loaded with class contempt for those upon whom they look down and regard as crude, common, and narrow-minded.

And so, whilst I'm perfectly happy for Schama to discuss the European migrant crisis with feeling, he's wrong (and disingenuous) to characterize those who prefer to address the issue as an urgent political problem that requires a practical solution which considers the needs not only of the displaced, but of the native populations asked to absorb a huge influx of people foreign in language, culture and tradition, as provincial and uncaring, or in some way prejudiced. 

Indeed, one is tempted to remind Professor Schama of what he said a few years ago when defending Israel's right to take military action against Hezbollah (including the bombing of cities in Lebanon): "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand."

- This Week, BBC One, 24 July 2006

Precisely! And that requires a cool head and what might seem to those who can afford to enjoy the indulgence of tears, a certain hardness of heart.              

Note: those interested in seeing the Question Time clash between Mssrs. Schama and Liddle (as well as reading the latter's take on it in his blog for The Spectator) should click here.

Oh Bondage Up Yours! (A Slice of Punk Nostalgia)

A model for Vivienne Westwood wearing an Exhibition Tartan Bondage jacket 

and Lyon Tartan Bondage trousers (Anglomania, A/W 2015)

viviennewestood.com 

I'm not entirely convinced by the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, but it's certainly true to say that within the fabulous world of fashion everything comes around again; yesterday's daring new looks so outmoded today will be marketed as avant-garde all over again tomorrow. 

Even designers who think of themselves as radical and revolutionary, invariably return to their old designs and recycle ideas. So it is, for example, that Vivienne Westwood is once again flogging her tartan bondage lines first seen all those years ago at Seditionaries. 

Of course, ripping garments out of their cultural and historical context robs them of their fetishistic power and subversive potential; transforming clothes for heroes into items of fancy dress for those who long for a past they didn't experience, or those who vainly wish to relive their youth. 

But, well, there you go: even ageing punks are prone to nostalgia and a certain wistfulness; just like the old rockers and hippies before them whom they so scorned. It's nothing to be proud of, but nothing to really feel so ashamed of either. 

Indeed, when I saw one of the models on Westwood's website wearing her mismatched tartan bondage jacket and trousers, even I couldn't help remembering with a certain poignant joy those years gone by when I would hobble around the streets of Soho still thinking of myself as a sex pistol and still fiercely loyal to Malcolm and his project of pop-cultural provocation:

Portrait of the artist as a young punk (1985) 

Sing if You're Glad to be Grey (On the Desire for the Neutral)

Last night, at dinner, a woman told me I was a colourful character. She meant it as a compliment (I assume), but if there's one thing I don't wish to be it's a character. 

People who have character, don't need to be characters; in the same way that people who have a certain vital intensity don't need to be seen to be larger than life. Characters, and individuals who are larger than life, are invariably just dullards behaving in a loud and boorish manner; the sort of people I try to avoid. 

As for being colourful, even that's something I find troublesome. These days, I aim for a certain achromatic neutrality or greyness and to be a man without qualities, like the mathematician Ulrich, in Robert Musil's (appropriately unfinished) novel; ambivalent, indifferent, lacking any essential self and viewing the world in all its vulgar excess of colour and violent enthusiasm with cool analytical passivity.

Those of a philosophical disposition have always appreciated that grey is the most beautiful - for most noble - of colours. During the Renaissance, it played an important role in fashion and art; Rembrandt, for example, had a palette made up almost entirely of complex shades of grey. 

Those who associate grey with boredom and conformity and perceive only an absence of colour, lack sophistication and subtlety. Let them wear their blues and browns in order to display their character; men in the know and men of style still favour a grey suit (light in summer, dark in winter) and understand like Roland Barthes that it is the Neutral alone which escapes and deconstructs the black-and-white binaries that structure meaning and produce the arrogance of certainty in Western thought and discourse.   

              

Worse Than Hitler

Several years ago, I gave a paper to the Philosophy For All crowd entitled Carry on Nietzsche: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is. Concerned primarily with the question of style and camp aesthetics, the paper was a playful comparative study of the German philosopher and Oscar Wilde and a promotion of what the former called die fröhliche Wissenschaft.   

At the end of the presentation, however, an East European woman stood up and accused me with a voice full of rising and righteous emotion of being morally bankrupt and politically suspect; she, she said, had seen for herself where my kind of nihilism leads (for she had visited Auschwitz). With tears in her eyes and a tremor in her voice - and all the while jabbing a finger in my direction - she concluded her case against me with the almost insane accusation that I was worse than Hitler. Not as bad, or in some way similar - but actually worse!

Thinking about this incident now, I see that her attempt to dismiss my work and shut-down discussion of it by playing the Nazi card is a classic example of what Leo Strauss termed reductio ad Hitlerum; an association fallacy which marks her intellectual desperation or lack of legitimate counterargument. She was simply attempting to distract people from what I had said, rather than debate the work.  

Further, one might wonder if it is in fact possible to be worse than Hitler - for doesn't Hitler serve as the absolute last word in evil within secular culture, much as the Devil used to serve when we were more religiously minded? Nick Land comments precisely - and brilliantly - on this:

"Hitler perfectly personifies demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics to attain the stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond Hitler it is impossible to go, or think. ... In this regard rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of reversed moral polarity. ... Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological 'first things'. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God ... and this identification has the force of 'self-evident truth'. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?)

- Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, Part 4: Re-running the race to ruin

On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird

 Anorexic Ballerina by Mexxkid 

deviantart.com 

What, ultimately, is dance, if not a method of becoming-bird; that is to say, a way in which the human being learns how to experience the incredible sensation of taking flight? This is why the connection between the ballerina and the swan is more than a delightful metaphor and why ballet is more than merely a form of entertainment. 

Spectators are right to be amazed by what they see on the stage, but if they press on beyond their astonishment at what young bodies can do, they'll discover that within classical dance is a profound experimental and ascetic practice, or what Amélie Nothomb describes as a fearsome ideal - one capable of ravaging the flesh and acting upon the mind like a drug.

Nothomb is right to understand ballet as a becoming-bird of the human being (although mistaken to think of this in the molar terms of species transformation). She's right also to stress the elements of violence and delirium, discipline and madness. Which is why it's not entirely outrageous to describe ballet training as a form of child abuse, involving psychological terror and physical maltreatment; a regime in which injuries are routinely ignored, eating disorders discreetly encouraged, and young dancers placed under constant pressure to push themselves beyond their own limits in order to develop wings.

As Nietzsche says, if you would teach young girls to fly in defiance of the spirit of gravity, you must first hollow out their bones and remove all obstacles to their becoming-bird: it is better to live in freedom with nothing to eat, than un-free and over-stuffed. 

However - crucially - Nietzsche also counsels taking things slowly: She who wants to learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and to walk and to run and climb ... and for these things you need strong legs and a healthy body. You can be thinspired, but anorexia is not the answer and there's no virtue in physical deprivation (no salvation through starvation). 

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here. 

     

ISIS Threaten Sylvania



Detail from ISIS Invade a Sylvanian Picnic (2014)

Part of the series ISIS Threaten Sylvania (2014/15), by Mimsy



ISIS Threaten Sylvania is a series of humourous (yet deadly serious) light-box images created by London-based artist Mimsy, featuring the loveable toy animals who make up the Sylvanian Families universe; rabbits, mice, hedgehogs and other woodland creatures all living in peace and harmony as they happily go about their daily lives. 

Until, that is, armed jihadis show-up and threaten to execute every individual of any species that doesn't submit to their extreme vision of the world.    

It's a piece of political satire, obviously, but the joke is more on us, in our cosy complacency, than it is the Islamists possessed by religious mania.

And the joke has only been intensified after the organizers of the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries gave in to police pressure to remove the work on the grounds that its inflammatory content might offend Muslim sensibilities, incite religious hatred, and potentially result in violence.    

The police - those well-known guardians of public morality and aesthetic judgement - informed the organizers that if they went ahead with their plans to display the work (which, in their view, had little or no artistic merit), then they would have to pay the £36,000 cost of extra security for the six-day show.    

It's a lot of money; enough at any rate to serve the purpose of effectively blackmailing the organizers and gallery owners into an act of self-censorship. Mimsy, the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had experienced religious persecution, was discreetly asked to withdraw her work, thereby legitimating it, of course.  

Despite being acutely aware of the danger of speaking out against Islamofascism, Mimsy has bravely declared that she has no intention of pandering to such, or attempting to justify her darkly funny work. Clearly, as Jonathan Jones has noted, if we cannot laugh at IS then the terrorists and black clad puppets of intolerance have already won.

Thus the suppression of these images - as of so many other images and texts - is not only absurd and cowardly, but sinister: "To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold."    

Notes

Those  interested in knowing more about the artist Mimsy and seeing further images from ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

Those interested in reading Jonathan Jones's Guardian review of ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

As a graduate of Warwick University, I feel obliged to say something about the case of Maryam Namazie - the Iranian-born activist and campaigner against religious violence and stupidity - who has been barred from speaking on campus by the student union on the grounds that she's a highly inflammatory figure likely to incite hatred.

This ludicrous and deeply shameful attempt to suppress the right of a woman who receives vile death threats on a regular basis to challenge Islamofascism and defend the values of secular society is justified on the grounds that Muslim students have the right not to feel insulted or intimidated.

Ms Namazie is right to be angry about this; to be labelled as an extremist for opposing those who would veil half the world's population and behead a large number of the other half if they could, is peculiarly offensive and, what is more, does a great disservice to those men and women who are living under Islamic regimes and have no opportunity to dissent or speak out.  

Clearly, the University needs to step in and ensure that a few hypersensitive and politically ultra-orthodox students (or useful idiots as Richard Dawkins describes them) do not bring a highly respected centre of learning into disrepute.

The only heartening thing is to see many academics, feminists, and intellectuals come to her defence and, hopefully, with their public support, Ms Namazie will get to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists' Society in October as planned. 

Afternote (28-09-15): After the University powers-that-be stepped in, the student union was forced to back down. An unequivocal apology was offered to Ms Namazie and she will now address the WASH Society as planned. Further details can be found in the Warwick SU News (click here). 

  

European Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance of the Sioux (1891)

The Ghost Dance was a last, desperate attempt by Native Americans to resist the White Man and preserve their own way of life. Performance of the dance was thought to unite the living with the spirits of the dead and enlist the latter in the fight for survival against those who came from far away with their strange customs and alien gods.

Essentially, it was a type of circle dance in which the men moved in unison with a soft, yet heavy-footed shuffle around a drum; a traditional form used by many tribes for millennia. But the ghost dance had new and deadly serious ceremonial significance and quickly spread at the end of the 19th century throughout much of the Western United States, with different peoples synthesizing aspects of the ritual dance with their own tribal beliefs.  

Of course, as we know, the dance failed to work its magic and halt white expansion; mystery religion, it seems, is ineffective in the face of guns and railways. For all their sacred and heroic effort, the Indians were doomed and their day passed.

What intrigues me, however, is this: in the face of the threat posed to their traditional culture by the mass influx of foreign bodies, will the indigenous peoples of Europe soon be the ones enacting their own version of the ghost dance (and will it be any more effective)? 

On the Human Atmosphere

Redheylin: The Human Aura 
(after a diagram by Walter J. Kilner)

Some people are convinced that all living things possess what they call a vital aura composed of psychic energies that sensitive individuals who are attuned to such can not only see - as a spectrum of colours - but also interpret; each colour being associated with some inner state of being or emotion. 

It's an attractive idea as these ideas often are, but it's nonsense, of course; as all such pseudo-scientific ideas to do with the subtle body are mystical nonsense.            

What each individual does possess, however, floating about them in a miasmatic manner, is a microbial cloud composed of the millions of microscopic particles that human beings continually shed from their hair, skin, and clothes and each cloud has a unique signature that can be read via a genetic analysis of the bacteria. In other words, investigators can identify an individual by sampling their personal germ cloud - which is pretty amazing. 

And it's equally amusing to think that - contrary to what the beautiful souls believe - we don't leave a shimmering astral imprint behind us when we exit an environment, or even a pretty, silvery trail of slime in the manner of a slug; but merely a puff of bad air like a stale fart.          

Note: readers interested in the latest scientific research on how humans differ from one another at the level of microbial clouds should click here.