Martha Nussbaum at Dissent applies her characteristically direct, rigorous, and ultra-lucid style to the question of gay marriage and constitutional law. As all three of the replies to the article acknowledge, it would be very hard indeed to muster an argument against in like-minded character. What gets me is the real bar to any argument for and against, and certainly the thing which motivates those who assiduously campaign against gay marriage: the homophobic animus. Again, as one of Nussbaum's repliers maintains, there is little by way of rational, reasonable argument to be found in the kind of minds besieged by this homophobic animus. Mounting a challenge to this is like waging a psychic war against an implacable, hateful id that for time immemorial has received institutional and constitutional assent for various manifestations of hatred, violence, and power.
But this reinforces Nussbaum's rigorous support for constitutional change!
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Commodity Fetishism
Berlin's squat scene, which I suppose goes without saying.
Something I stumbled on just this minute.
Not exactly a new edition (a misleading term, this, sometimes) but a beautiful reprint with an elegant and actually quite ingenious new cover. Same old astonishing content.
Something I stumbled on just this minute.
Not exactly a new edition (a misleading term, this, sometimes) but a beautiful reprint with an elegant and actually quite ingenious new cover. Same old astonishing content.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Liberals need our brotherly help
We shouldn't settle for a capitalism with a human face (which has many faces).
New forms of colonisation via purchasing of arable land in developing countries.
Fascism fills in for a failed revolution.
Slavoj Žižek's latest performance from Marxism 2009:
New forms of colonisation via purchasing of arable land in developing countries.
Fascism fills in for a failed revolution.
Slavoj Žižek's latest performance from Marxism 2009:
Friday, 3 July 2009
Launch of Corridor 8
With doom-laden reports of newspapers folding (excuse the pun), surrendering to the growing primacy of new media, it is truly heartening, exciting, and generally restorative for the soul to discover that a new magazine is being launched. And in the middle of this so-called recession!
The first issue of Manchester-based Corridor 8 will be released this month at the city's Urbis. The ambition and artistic reach of this annual arts magazine are indicated by a new commission from Iain Sinclair, whose first ever psychogeographic foray into the north west of England (no surprises that the location had to be Manchester) promises to be a groundbreaking contribution. (Again, excuse the pun. None of these are intentional, by the way!) I anticipate that Sinclair will acknowledge some level of debt to Sebald's The Emigrants, a work of prose fiction not explicitly psychogeographic but which stands as one of the first major accounts of its kind for the palimpsest landscape of Manchester. The magazine's website offers the following quotation to tantalise us:
The depth and range of this first edition is impressive: from psychogeography to Alan Dunn's reflections on how the internet can abolish vast geographical boundaries in the name of international social inclusion and cohesion, Corridor 8 promises to be a distinguished publication indeed.
The first issue of Manchester-based Corridor 8 will be released this month at the city's Urbis. The ambition and artistic reach of this annual arts magazine are indicated by a new commission from Iain Sinclair, whose first ever psychogeographic foray into the north west of England (no surprises that the location had to be Manchester) promises to be a groundbreaking contribution. (Again, excuse the pun. None of these are intentional, by the way!) I anticipate that Sinclair will acknowledge some level of debt to Sebald's The Emigrants, a work of prose fiction not explicitly psychogeographic but which stands as one of the first major accounts of its kind for the palimpsest landscape of Manchester. The magazine's website offers the following quotation to tantalise us:
Wandering Deansgate was like finding yourself in the middle of some dark fantasy for which you had no instructions. Cliffs of unreason. Deansgate as a river of human traffic, the Irwell its liquid margin.Curiously enough, Sinclair's piece is accompanied by images from Chris Petit, another writer whose work crosses Sebaldian paths (Petit got there first, though, in a way) and whose current project, like Will Self's forthcoming book, is informed by Sebaldian methodologies and subject matter.
The depth and range of this first edition is impressive: from psychogeography to Alan Dunn's reflections on how the internet can abolish vast geographical boundaries in the name of international social inclusion and cohesion, Corridor 8 promises to be a distinguished publication indeed.
Philip Hoare talks
..here to the Guardian, about winning the Samuel Johnson Prize, whaling, and fear of water.
Refulgent rainbow?
It's London Pride tomorrow.
The Times was in rainbow colours last weekend.
Peter Tatchell isn't impressed with Gordon Brown's status as a gay-hugging PM. There's also more work to be done to continue the radicalism of the Stonewall Riots.
Meanwhile, over the water, there are also contradictions afoot in the White House.
Still, there are certainly reasons to be positive and celebratory.
Two things to buy: a re-released Stonewall Riots doc; and what sounds like a fun, fascinating, but certainly not frivolous film from Cuba: Strawberry and Chocolate.
The Times was in rainbow colours last weekend.
Peter Tatchell isn't impressed with Gordon Brown's status as a gay-hugging PM. There's also more work to be done to continue the radicalism of the Stonewall Riots.
Meanwhile, over the water, there are also contradictions afoot in the White House.
Still, there are certainly reasons to be positive and celebratory.
Two things to buy: a re-released Stonewall Riots doc; and what sounds like a fun, fascinating, but certainly not frivolous film from Cuba: Strawberry and Chocolate.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Behind the beat
An ignorant, lopsided critique of Terence Davies' Of Time and the City can be found here on Mute's website. This article is a shame, since some of the issues it discusses - about regeneration, class disenfranchisement, useless property development - ring true in the daily life of Liverpool, which was last year's European Capital of Culture and is the subject of Davies' film.
But Davies' film is used unfairly as a battering ram for the negligence of things way beyond the director's reach. True, Peter Carty credits Davies' past work, but somehow finds Of Time and the City as an unwitting reflection of burgeoning elitism and class alienation in quite possibly one of the most world-historical working class cities in the world. My problem with Carty's article is its bitter tone. He targets Davies' 'plummy' accent, saying that the director's 'dulcet tones of privilege are a betrayal, though he cannot bear all the blame for this'. The slight forgiveness granted in that last clause leads on to some unfair abuse of middle class Liverpudlians such as George Melly, John Peel (who was Wirral-bound anyway, and so is ripe for ethnic alienation from Liverpool), and of course Beryl Bainbridge, though I do agree with this particular example: Bainbridge is a complete snob whose declarations about Scousers requiring elocution lessons stands as unreconstructed class hatred, full of the kind of prejudice that Merseysiders face even to this day. But lobbing Davies in with Bainbridge? Terence Davies fans will know from his films and from interviews how there is not one prejudiced bone in his body. He has expressed in interview how his accent and passion for the kind of language socio-historically alien to that spoken by his populous family are themselves an expression of his outsider status as a gay Catholic yearning for Bruckner and glamorous Hollywood actresses on Lime Street cinema screens. In light of such facts, Carty's inverted snobbery is grossly unfair and in some cases unforgivably insensitive.
I am almost dizzy at the extent to which I think Carty is just plain wrong on most of what he says. His critique is old-fashioned and not progressive but actually regressive in its suggestion that it is only to popular culture that the working classes flock. He claims that the film's music is incongruous with its images of working class life, but I know from having met working class audience members of Davies' film during its extended run at FACT that there was an interest in things beyond the pub song. One gentleman asked me about the music that accompanies the transfiguring closing sequence, which was Mahler's Second Symphony, known as 'The Resurrection'. I then went on to recommend recordings. Yes, working class people can fall in love with Mahler, you know! But the debates about culture and class are so closed-minded as to suggest that really, no, it's not for them; it's elitist and beyond their ken. Carty commits the unforgivable error of attributing Mahler's posthumous reputation to dubious appropriations by an audience that is passionate about the work but fails to understand it in any real sense beyond its surface melodrama and retro-gilded sensibilities. This is the 'Wouldn't You Just Die Without Mahler' clique, or, as Carty claims, those who adore 'a composer who perennially signifies bohemianism* for the irredeemably bourgeois'. What is beyond this writer is the fact that Mahler suffered terribly as a Jew in viscious anti-Semitic Vienna and so was himself as alienated as the working classes themselves. Listen with open minds and ears to Mahler's klezmer- and brass band-inflected voicing and you will realise that the old dinstinctions between High and Low are irrelevant. In any case, it makes little sense to be ingornant of forms of oppression when marshalling an argument against oppression itself.
The terms of Carty's debate are perennial: the working classes are instinctively and genetically non-responsive to High Art. The language of Eliot and Joyce is not their language, by which is meant that because it doesn't speak in their terms, it is not open to their minds. Pace Of Time and the City. Quite apart from the fact that another documentary of working class life with images of dockers and young peacocks in hair-rollers overlaid with Buddy Holly and the Beatles would have made for yet another cliched attempt at representation, it would have also made for a much less powerful paean to an iconic city. There is something about the rarefied language and unfamiliar music that deepens the viewer's connection with the images panning slowly before the eyes in that inimitable Terence Davies fashion. A socialist critic might call it alienation; not the form adumbrated by Marx and lived in by the working classes, but the strategy adopted by artists by which they seek to deepen the viewer's awareness by distancing her/him from everyday, quotidian reality. Of Time and the City transfigures its subject by dignifying its well-worn images and life with words and music the people consider are not for them, can't be about them. But they are; they really are.
[*It is unfortunate for Carty that a massive irony lies behind his unwitting use of this word. It even increases his overall ignorance, for Mahler actually was Bohemian, born in 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic!]
But Davies' film is used unfairly as a battering ram for the negligence of things way beyond the director's reach. True, Peter Carty credits Davies' past work, but somehow finds Of Time and the City as an unwitting reflection of burgeoning elitism and class alienation in quite possibly one of the most world-historical working class cities in the world. My problem with Carty's article is its bitter tone. He targets Davies' 'plummy' accent, saying that the director's 'dulcet tones of privilege are a betrayal, though he cannot bear all the blame for this'. The slight forgiveness granted in that last clause leads on to some unfair abuse of middle class Liverpudlians such as George Melly, John Peel (who was Wirral-bound anyway, and so is ripe for ethnic alienation from Liverpool), and of course Beryl Bainbridge, though I do agree with this particular example: Bainbridge is a complete snob whose declarations about Scousers requiring elocution lessons stands as unreconstructed class hatred, full of the kind of prejudice that Merseysiders face even to this day. But lobbing Davies in with Bainbridge? Terence Davies fans will know from his films and from interviews how there is not one prejudiced bone in his body. He has expressed in interview how his accent and passion for the kind of language socio-historically alien to that spoken by his populous family are themselves an expression of his outsider status as a gay Catholic yearning for Bruckner and glamorous Hollywood actresses on Lime Street cinema screens. In light of such facts, Carty's inverted snobbery is grossly unfair and in some cases unforgivably insensitive.
I am almost dizzy at the extent to which I think Carty is just plain wrong on most of what he says. His critique is old-fashioned and not progressive but actually regressive in its suggestion that it is only to popular culture that the working classes flock. He claims that the film's music is incongruous with its images of working class life, but I know from having met working class audience members of Davies' film during its extended run at FACT that there was an interest in things beyond the pub song. One gentleman asked me about the music that accompanies the transfiguring closing sequence, which was Mahler's Second Symphony, known as 'The Resurrection'. I then went on to recommend recordings. Yes, working class people can fall in love with Mahler, you know! But the debates about culture and class are so closed-minded as to suggest that really, no, it's not for them; it's elitist and beyond their ken. Carty commits the unforgivable error of attributing Mahler's posthumous reputation to dubious appropriations by an audience that is passionate about the work but fails to understand it in any real sense beyond its surface melodrama and retro-gilded sensibilities. This is the 'Wouldn't You Just Die Without Mahler' clique, or, as Carty claims, those who adore 'a composer who perennially signifies bohemianism* for the irredeemably bourgeois'. What is beyond this writer is the fact that Mahler suffered terribly as a Jew in viscious anti-Semitic Vienna and so was himself as alienated as the working classes themselves. Listen with open minds and ears to Mahler's klezmer- and brass band-inflected voicing and you will realise that the old dinstinctions between High and Low are irrelevant. In any case, it makes little sense to be ingornant of forms of oppression when marshalling an argument against oppression itself.
The terms of Carty's debate are perennial: the working classes are instinctively and genetically non-responsive to High Art. The language of Eliot and Joyce is not their language, by which is meant that because it doesn't speak in their terms, it is not open to their minds. Pace Of Time and the City. Quite apart from the fact that another documentary of working class life with images of dockers and young peacocks in hair-rollers overlaid with Buddy Holly and the Beatles would have made for yet another cliched attempt at representation, it would have also made for a much less powerful paean to an iconic city. There is something about the rarefied language and unfamiliar music that deepens the viewer's connection with the images panning slowly before the eyes in that inimitable Terence Davies fashion. A socialist critic might call it alienation; not the form adumbrated by Marx and lived in by the working classes, but the strategy adopted by artists by which they seek to deepen the viewer's awareness by distancing her/him from everyday, quotidian reality. Of Time and the City transfigures its subject by dignifying its well-worn images and life with words and music the people consider are not for them, can't be about them. But they are; they really are.
[*It is unfortunate for Carty that a massive irony lies behind his unwitting use of this word. It even increases his overall ignorance, for Mahler actually was Bohemian, born in 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic!]
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