The limits of irony

Alanis Morissette is well known for a song that brought millions of pedants out of the woodwork (or should this be 'wordwork'?!) on account of the misuse of one word: irony. 'Isn't it ironic', the phrase goes, many times during the same song, and without, as those semantic jobsworths claim, actually offering any examples of irony. Some of Morissette's examples are ironic, though, because they offer a juxtaposition of two things not normally compared, and which consequently challenges our assumptions about comparability and similarity.

Now irony is being abused by one of this country's putative bastions of everything standard English. The BBC, currently mired in a number of controversies due to the use or abuse of irony by a number of its high-ranking, top-paid entertainers, certainly thinks it can deliver the ethical status quo when it comes to the pernicious, bullying, playground coinage, 'gay'. According to the BBC's defense of Chris Moyles, one of its Radio 1 DJs, using the word 'gay' to denote something which you hold in contempt and low regard is all very much par for the course. It acknowledges, does it not, the evolution of language, and the way in which a word enters into a new phase of its semantic history.

But can you defend the use of any potentially offensive word on the basis of the fact that it is being correctly used according to new stages in its semantic development? Supposing a racially abusive word (you know which ones) received a new coinage and was thus used to such an extent that made the BBC felt its use on air contravened standards of linguistic decency. Because that is - rightly - what would happen; the BBC could never condone the use of a once racially abusive word on the basis of evolving etymology.

The fact of the matter is that the contemporary coinage of the word 'gay' is linked to hateful - sometimes fatal - contempt for gay people, but is now applied to an entire world of objects which we think are lowly, contemptuous, useless, disposable, closest to refuse - that of which we would rather dispose. Having been used positively by the gay community to reclaim dignity and self-worth, it has been seized by a supposedly non-offensive community of users who have insidiously refashioned the word to reflect their long-held hate for gays.

Not very ironic, then, really. I wonder what giddy heights the BBC will take their lowly hypocrisy to next?

In the eye of the beholder, as they say

Meaning beauty, which was up for discussion at one of the National Trusts new series of debates. Being discussed by the likes of Roger Scruton, Germaine Greer, David Starkey, and Stephen Bailey, was the subject of Britain's sensitivity to notions of beauty, or in fact beauty itself. No surprises where the positive and negative camps fell, though; and the article in today's Observer emphasises this through their descriptions of Scruton and Starkey:

Roger Scruton
Philosopher and author of more than 30 books including a defence of fox hunting

David Starkey
Academic and broadcaster known for popularising history with books and TV series

Fox hunting and popularisation: two things not normally considered to be beautiful. (In terms of Henry Porter's piece here, you could accuse Starkey of contributing to the devaluation of culture, actually, since he's on TV and TV, being dead, has done irreparable damage to the living cultures of performance and debate.)

Greer's dissent against the notion of British indifference to beauty is the most eloquently argued, I would say. Being an optimist, though, I suppose I am bound to line up with her and Bayley (alongside not liking Scruton much at all). Scruton's new book on beauty receives an unfavourable review in another of the Observer's sections.

Former PM suggests religion will be as important to 21st century as ideology was to 20th

..being the headline for this report from the Guardian.

Which begs the question whether religion will be as destructive for this century as ideology was for the twentieth. Which makes you think whether we should be confining religion to the personal and restricting its access to the political. The Vatican, or Tony's and Cherie's church, has done it again. The Roman Catholic church clearly cannot handle being in the 21st century. (Mind you, it couldn't quite handle being in the twentieth, either.) This is why I think Tony and Cherie should dedicated their lives not to a faith foundation but to a social justice foundation, which would be charged with the commendable ethos the faith version currently pursues but without genuflection to faith.

A billboard

An advert for the film Bronson alternates with a campaign from the Department for Families, Schools and Children, within the same week and on the same billboard.

The randonimity of advertising or the impossibility of resolving the contradictions in human nature?

The presence of the past

David Chipperfield's restoration of Berlin's Neues Museum was completed last week. Berliners and Berlin visitors were given the weekend to roam the empty building, which from now until autumn will be progressively filled with the city's collection of antiquities. This collection has not been seen inside the Neues Museum since before the Second World War, and the building itself lay in progressive ruination during the postwar era. Berlin's Museuminsel, once totally complete, will be the envy of the world. But the story of its redevelopment is as powerfully historical as the narrative provided by its vast collections. And it is perhaps not surprising that this blog should draw attention to the Sebaldian resonances of Chipperfield's massive project: in other words, to what Austerlitz himself would have thought upon roaming a vast and empty institution such as the Neues Museum, bereft of its exhibits, but certainly not lacking in the presence of the past.

Bernhard Schulz in his commentary here walks us through the beautiful and elegant 'restoration'. In particular I liked the following:

Throughout the building there should should be no doubt as to which elements are true to the original, which ones have been restored, which ones have been supplemented or copied, and which ones are completely new. Many demands are placed on the eye of the beholder but historicity of the architecture becomes legible. This corresponds perfectly to the spirit in which the New Museum was created – because it was designed to bear witness to the state of archaeology, a field just taking shape at the time and inseparable from the idea of transience.

Many things converging

Two things surfaced unexpectedly a few weeks ago in a copy of the Autumn/Winter 2008 edition of Vertigo I was given. The first thing was an article by Will Stone on the artist Emily Richardson's Cobra Mist, a short film about the abandoned bomb test site at Orford Ness in East Suffolk. The second thing was a piece by Chris Petit about his current film project, commissioned by Channel 4, which is something like a sequel to his now classic 1979 film Radio On. Both articles are consecutive in the order of the magazine's contents, and whereas one mentions Sebald directly, the other is haunted by Sebald through an implicit association with the latter's The Rings of Saturn, in which Orford Ness distinctly features. Stone does not mention Sebald, but Petit does, explaining that his new project is 'defined roughly by the work of the English writer Iain Sinclair, with whom I have made several award-winning film collaborations, and the late Anglo-German writer W.G. Sebald'. Richardson's film, like Sebald's own account in his text, is described as a document of a landscape that, because of its role in the history of warfare and its ostensible uninhabitability, is unyielding to the human. Petit mentions how heritage desiccates and effectively ruins our relationship to the past, and it is therefore odd to learn that such a place as Orford Ness is now owned and maintained by the National Trust, that institutional paragon of heritage formation. You have to wonder what the National Trust's regular patron would think upon a visit to Orford Ness, being as it is totally unsuited to the kind of process which Petit defines as history/heritage: 'History, in England anyway, has been replaced by heritage, a diluted, more commercial version and often bogus reworking of the past that can be turned into money and sponsorship in a way that history can't.'

How fascinating it is, however, to encounter two articles so interlinked but which provide no mention of each other. I'd be interested to learn if the essay accompanying this DVD of Emily Richardson's work invokes Sebald as the source of influence for Cobra Mist. Good news too that Channel 4 has commissioned an artist and film maker like Chris Petit to work on such a richly-researched project. Having watched and been startled by Red Riding last week, Petit's sober conclusion about the state of television today provokes many thoughts on the subject of its potential future - more work done by artists and film makers has to be commissioned in order to rescue television culture from it current morass:

In a way, this film will be a swan song to a kind of cinema and about what is possible and not possible any more, in English television at least. Its commissioner has said as much, complaining that no one is interested any longer in what anything is about or even asking what kind of programmes people should be making.

Alone in Berlin

As in my nightmares, as in reality. (Or the reality of a newly-published novel out this week written by someone who was there at the time.)

All within a week of each other.

Whose standards?

Cherie Blair's argument for the future of Christianity exposes a general condition of religious belief, which is that no matter how liberal or embracing of gays and women believers may be, they are always at risk of undervaluing such concern through the hypocrisy of institutional allegiance. There is no escape from it. Cherie Blair clearly believes in social justice, but over the years has come out more for social justice as organised from within Christianity. (This is at the root of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.) But I can't help thinking that Christians who argue for social justice are only wanting the best of both worlds. Because there's getting away from the fact that social justice and the church, like any such combination between ethics and institutions, are not always consistently applied. Cherie Blair noted the absence of the one from the other in the case of the Holocaust, but seemed to redeem (wrong word?) Christianity on the basis of one man: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The moral rectitude of Bonhoeffer's resistance against the Nazis is unquestioned, but surely his example of Christianity cannot on its own confirm the enduring verity of Christian values at at time when its institutions were indifferent towards and in some cases complicit with the Nazi Party's policies towards European Jews. I find Cherie Blair's convictions in this regard quite astonishing: Bonhoeffer's singularity is made to redeem the failure of collective Christian values as practised by its mighty institutions. This kind of rhetorical manoeuvre pops up recurrently in the defense of monotheistic religions: namely, the exclusive caveat that sidesteps massive contradictions in argument and the underlying hypocrisy of the moral system under consideration.

Cherie Blair's interviews certainly covered all grounds, but left some esteemed interviewees crucially unchallenged. I cannot for one second believe that the founder of the Chicago megachurch that Cherie Blair seemed to endorse (as the development of her argument later proved) wouldn't hail down on an interviewer on the question of gay rights; but Cherie Blair was not forthcoming in this regard, so we will never know. Nor will we know whether the might of the USA megachurches would at some point in the future attempt to curtail what freedoms the LGBT community have steadily garnered over the years. If California's decision to ban gay marriages is anything to go by, then we shouldn't be too hopeful (wrong word?) at the prospect of support from the evangelicals. And yet Cherie Blair is so enamoured of the megachurch system that it has influenced her view on the future of Christianity: namely, that the decline of European Christianity is not rooted in the question of faith but that of organisation. Sitting amongst the ruins of Liverpool churches, Cherie Blair argued that it is the question of architecture, not core values, that Christianity should address, and that should European Christendom reinvent itself in the monolithic form of the ugly megachurch, then the masses will naturally follow.

A chill ran through me as I watched these segments of the programme. The thought of megachurches being erected up and down our defiantly un-mega isles terrified me. Give me Wal-Mart, Tesco, Costco, any day - but megachurches? No thanks. Those corporate Goliaths may be obese, but they do not demand obeisance. All of which makes me think that the most glaring irony of Cherie Blair's passion for the future of Christianity is that it could always be channelled into the future of socialism per se. Because there can be social justice without the word of God and that of His son and all that this has entailed throughout history.

One other question raised by Cherie Blair's programme is that if enlightened Christians are so passionate about inter-faith relations (which, again, is at the core of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation), itself directed at erasing enmity between the world's monotheistic factions, then does this not ultimately question the effectiveness of religion as a way of improving social cohesion? I find all of this discombobulating, for does not socialism allow for the right to religious belief, whereas its sense of justice is rooted in humanity per se, irrespective of religious belief, sexual orientation, and/or race?