The ninth night
The last echoes of an old song drift on the air before the cold breeze of the new dawn disperses it.
Two thousand years
Two thousand years
Of your
God damn Glory (18)
“A new order of the ages (19) has begun”, a world order of global elites with an all-embracing ideology, the politics of ‘Sixram rising up into the gaps vacated by the messiah’s fainthearted followers. Lines of blond giants, flex their six packs, marching to the military beat of ‘This Gift’, (20) their gift to the people; gleaming torsos, slicked back hair and shining teeth. The ground shakes as they pass, young girls throw flowers and boys join in behind, mimicking the ‘Sixram quickstep march. People lean out from first floor windows to watch them pass, they keep their ground floor windows shut. The new politics of ‘Sixram a pure notion of embodied essence; it knows itself in its own shape and is the spirit of change. The aim of this movement is to supersede the cardinal distinctions and to shape self-consciousness.
Behind closed doors a different truth is whispered in the older tongue of Swen. A post-colonic patois learnt from the oppressor, now the lingua franca of the underclass.
“A new universe is begun”, dark separated from light, matter hidden within energy, its power based on exchange. The physics of this domain are weightless, gravity is not a force to fear, magnetism rules and metals valued more than life. In this universe star systems can flicker shuddering into being, while ancient worlds can suddenly switch off. The people of this place have little sense of history, their politics a strange affair of butterfly alliances; voters pressing buttons of desire, selecting politicians on their acts of song and dance. A socialist will dance a jig and win a term in power, a fascist sing an excerpt from an operatic medley and find himself a spokesman for the poor. All candidates will swear an oath in front of watching billions, to speak the truth and hold on tight to Volta’s words of wisdom. (21)
The electronic networks will now open to their new charge and political particles readjust and reform elemental matters. Political interpretation in this universe changes totality with observation. Positive or negative disclosures reverse polarity and entire systems can be torn apart on viewing. Those who wish to enter this field are therefore rigorously trained and moulded from their youth.
(1) The dominant discourses are observation and (2) change. (As all observations change the system, we have to account for the reasons they were made).
1) There is a three phase system in place. a) A political current is active. b) An information channel is open, its tele-technics have been registered. c) The academic current is now passive. Its power source now coupled with the ghost of electricity.
2) There is trust in a closed circuit. It contains both the weak force of rhetoric and the strong force of ideology. Note: This system has many relays, each of which is prone to fusing, in particular when in conjunction with the weak messianic force.
18 Jefferson Starship (1970) Blows against the Empire RCA Records Track one, side two: Sunrise Written by Grace Slick
19 New Order of the Ages can be translated into Latin as ‘novus ordo seclorum’ a phrase found on the back of the United States’ one dollar note.
20 New World Order (2009) This Gift: on the record label; This Space For Rent
New World Order is a pop-rock band with a wide range of influences ranging from pop-punk to indie-rock to post-hardcore. Their music combines melodic and aggressive guitars with vocal harmonies of pop sensibility.
21 Volta did not believe Galvani's theory that animal tissue contained a form of electricity. In order to disprove Galvini, Volta built the first voltaic pile to prove that electricity could not be generated by animals and to further prove that it was generated by the contact of metals in a moist environment. They were both it turns out, right.
Sunday 30 January 2011
Wednesday 26 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (8)
The eighth night
Conjuring Marxism
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s Three o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s six o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s eight o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s dinner time!"
Modern times (15) slip through the gears of past time’s celestial clock, a breakdown in order prefigures the new Depression; they’re out to get the middle class this time.
It’s time to take a register of all the actors present. Of all the revolutionaries only Houdini has a script, the others wait to watch the act he plans; a transposition with his mage Houdin. Nietzsche is happy knitting in the aisle, he will improvise when the time comes, he is very aware that convictions are more dangerous than lies (16) and that these conjurations will be no more than entertainment. Gurdjieff believes that the whole company is still in a state of a waking sleep and shapes a levitation trick for the evening’s events. Marx himself is still rehearsing his illusion of penetration, something he has learnt from Hegel, who himself will undertake prediction as an entertaining conundrum.
The opening act is Freddy and the Dreamers, strains of their hit song, "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody", drift from the rehearsal room.
The media removes all authentic phenomena, without phenomena (observation in perception) there is no essence, without essence (soul) there is no religion. If an observation is made, it changes reality, therefore the media instead of it being a technology of change, is in fact the technology of repression and stasis.
These specters are the ghosts of the Avant Garde, forward scouts, spying out the enemy and checking for ambush. As full-time military men they know what it is to put a shine on their boots. For some time now they have been in dispute with the ruling powers but maximum profit for minimum effort is something they can also appreciate. The Avant Garde has always believed in the existence of an antithetical Sisyphus, no labour and constant reward.
For Camus, Sisyphus is the hero, Prometheus like he stands for honest toil, bridging the gulf between man and Gods, human in his sin and if we are to imagine him happy; revolt his precondition.
In each downfall lies the possibility of moral greatness. In each triumphant claim of victory lies a lack of conscience.
The sound of American music echoes in the hall, the players stand to dance, as a small white dog (17) parades under the spotlight; it appears to be a familiar.
15 Chaplin, C (1936) Modern Times USA: United Artists
16 Nietzsche (2008) Human, all too Human, London: Wordsworth The full quote is: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies”
17 Dogmatix is a tiny white dog who belongs to Obelix in the Asterix comics. Dogmatix is a pun on the words dog and dogmatic. In the original French his name is Idéfix, itself a pun on the French expression idée fixe (fixed idea) meaning an obsession.
Conjuring Marxism
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s Three o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s six o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s eight o'clock!"
“What time is it Mister Wolf?”
“It’s dinner time!"
Modern times (15) slip through the gears of past time’s celestial clock, a breakdown in order prefigures the new Depression; they’re out to get the middle class this time.
It’s time to take a register of all the actors present. Of all the revolutionaries only Houdini has a script, the others wait to watch the act he plans; a transposition with his mage Houdin. Nietzsche is happy knitting in the aisle, he will improvise when the time comes, he is very aware that convictions are more dangerous than lies (16) and that these conjurations will be no more than entertainment. Gurdjieff believes that the whole company is still in a state of a waking sleep and shapes a levitation trick for the evening’s events. Marx himself is still rehearsing his illusion of penetration, something he has learnt from Hegel, who himself will undertake prediction as an entertaining conundrum.
The opening act is Freddy and the Dreamers, strains of their hit song, "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody", drift from the rehearsal room.
The media removes all authentic phenomena, without phenomena (observation in perception) there is no essence, without essence (soul) there is no religion. If an observation is made, it changes reality, therefore the media instead of it being a technology of change, is in fact the technology of repression and stasis.
These specters are the ghosts of the Avant Garde, forward scouts, spying out the enemy and checking for ambush. As full-time military men they know what it is to put a shine on their boots. For some time now they have been in dispute with the ruling powers but maximum profit for minimum effort is something they can also appreciate. The Avant Garde has always believed in the existence of an antithetical Sisyphus, no labour and constant reward.
For Camus, Sisyphus is the hero, Prometheus like he stands for honest toil, bridging the gulf between man and Gods, human in his sin and if we are to imagine him happy; revolt his precondition.
In each downfall lies the possibility of moral greatness. In each triumphant claim of victory lies a lack of conscience.
The sound of American music echoes in the hall, the players stand to dance, as a small white dog (17) parades under the spotlight; it appears to be a familiar.
15 Chaplin, C (1936) Modern Times USA: United Artists
16 Nietzsche (2008) Human, all too Human, London: Wordsworth The full quote is: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies”
17 Dogmatix is a tiny white dog who belongs to Obelix in the Asterix comics. Dogmatix is a pun on the words dog and dogmatic. In the original French his name is Idéfix, itself a pun on the French expression idée fixe (fixed idea) meaning an obsession.
Tuesday 25 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (7)
Seventh night
Joining the disparate is theory. We seek pattern in everything. Stars become crabs, bears and fish; scholars spend lifetimes pouring over maps and faded manuscripts looking for signs of Vatican conspiracies that hide the proof that Jesus was a sexual adventurer. The deeper question is what lies behind the need for patterning? The urge to do this must be a survival trait, our ancestors would not have survived without it and we now inherit this facility.
Those old patterns, plant growth and animal migration and their link to the seasons; the movement of the heavens that can be used to predict when these seasons will occur; when to plant, when to hunt, when to prepare for winter and a time of famine, all essential planning if the tribe is to survive.
Is theory going to support practice? Can Marx help us plan for survival? Can the old patterns be refreshed by what he had to say?
Justice can be put on hold whilst the question is answered. Complexity is everywhere now and we need to see the patterns beneath the patterns if we are to survive and perhaps Marx can give us a lens with which to look for these.
The problem of knowledge is that on the on hand it tends to be horded and on the other it is hard to know what knowledge is. Sometimes it is simply discourse parading as knowledge. The academic sector has a vested interest in calling all its activities knowledge generating, but sometimes all it is conversation.
The enemy of art and philosophy is style. If Marx is a philosopher let’s hope he has no style and that his interpreters don’t occlude his words with rhetoric. If so the permanent revolution loses its potency as familiarity breeds contempt.
Scientific Marxism claimed a ground that has since been seen to be shifting sand. In the service of Marx we have to be humble, to approach the words as children with a rhyme, a rhyme that will be long remembered for its metre and its words but not its historical gestation.
We need to learn by example, to mimic and to copy, return to an Eastern way that has been sliced out of our Western tradition.
Remember Marx is not a Marxist, his concept of fetishism a true brother of Christ and sister to the Holy Spirit.
The money system casts a giant shadow over all ideology, the canker in the rose of life, the serpent in the garden.
Hegel intuits this but still advances his concept of a desire for absolute knowing, even though he is aware that religion is being destroyed by a belief in usury. The lost shape of the ghost (spirit) the true form of the self. The spirit knows itself as the shape of the spirit, its content being received in the shape of the self. This desire for absolute knowing is itself the shadow cast across Derrida’s interpretations of Marx.
We live in times when bankers still practice their alchemy, sub-prime mortgages transforming straw into gold, as stock brokers melt down our words and labour into gold and silver for investor slugs to feed on, while pinstriped vampires roam the city, with their grimy legal papers, blood dripping from their fountain pens as they sign us all to debt.
One day the blades will be unsheathed, their sharp edges glints of light in the dark of economic gloom before the blood of capital is sold cheaply on the market.
Joining the disparate is theory. We seek pattern in everything. Stars become crabs, bears and fish; scholars spend lifetimes pouring over maps and faded manuscripts looking for signs of Vatican conspiracies that hide the proof that Jesus was a sexual adventurer. The deeper question is what lies behind the need for patterning? The urge to do this must be a survival trait, our ancestors would not have survived without it and we now inherit this facility.
Those old patterns, plant growth and animal migration and their link to the seasons; the movement of the heavens that can be used to predict when these seasons will occur; when to plant, when to hunt, when to prepare for winter and a time of famine, all essential planning if the tribe is to survive.
Is theory going to support practice? Can Marx help us plan for survival? Can the old patterns be refreshed by what he had to say?
Justice can be put on hold whilst the question is answered. Complexity is everywhere now and we need to see the patterns beneath the patterns if we are to survive and perhaps Marx can give us a lens with which to look for these.
The problem of knowledge is that on the on hand it tends to be horded and on the other it is hard to know what knowledge is. Sometimes it is simply discourse parading as knowledge. The academic sector has a vested interest in calling all its activities knowledge generating, but sometimes all it is conversation.
The enemy of art and philosophy is style. If Marx is a philosopher let’s hope he has no style and that his interpreters don’t occlude his words with rhetoric. If so the permanent revolution loses its potency as familiarity breeds contempt.
Scientific Marxism claimed a ground that has since been seen to be shifting sand. In the service of Marx we have to be humble, to approach the words as children with a rhyme, a rhyme that will be long remembered for its metre and its words but not its historical gestation.
We need to learn by example, to mimic and to copy, return to an Eastern way that has been sliced out of our Western tradition.
Remember Marx is not a Marxist, his concept of fetishism a true brother of Christ and sister to the Holy Spirit.
The money system casts a giant shadow over all ideology, the canker in the rose of life, the serpent in the garden.
Hegel intuits this but still advances his concept of a desire for absolute knowing, even though he is aware that religion is being destroyed by a belief in usury. The lost shape of the ghost (spirit) the true form of the self. The spirit knows itself as the shape of the spirit, its content being received in the shape of the self. This desire for absolute knowing is itself the shadow cast across Derrida’s interpretations of Marx.
We live in times when bankers still practice their alchemy, sub-prime mortgages transforming straw into gold, as stock brokers melt down our words and labour into gold and silver for investor slugs to feed on, while pinstriped vampires roam the city, with their grimy legal papers, blood dripping from their fountain pens as they sign us all to debt.
One day the blades will be unsheathed, their sharp edges glints of light in the dark of economic gloom before the blood of capital is sold cheaply on the market.
Monday 24 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (6)
The sixth night
Austin (12) was concerned to read our speech as acts, acts that could be pretence or real, authentic communication being suspect, the meaning being the use and how reality was changed.
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house. (13)
There is no point in trying to straighten this out. An embedded memory, its crookedness a rightness, that if eradicated erases what it is it be human.
We should not fight against our nature. The tragedy of birth is its sweet optimism in those short days before future voices rage against that blackest night of blood stained sheets and dark conception. Even the newly born have a past, a past cursed by the living when life is unendurable and swift death a blessed blasphemy.
The language of passion cannot be measured by reason, in wishing suicide we also end those other lives extended through our own, so easily extinguished when we die.
The son who wants to better himself leaves his small hometown behind, forgetting the responsibility of blood. This the origionary wrong, only made right by prodigal return. If the ties are severed a cancer is born, eating slowly at the bowels, a hidden spectre of regret, the hell waiting for every son who goes against his father. The renown we seek a poor replacement for a father’s blessing and recognition of our worth.
A text we loved in youth can seem a foolish verse in later years, but if excommunicated will still continue living in a neighbouring domain. If an idea is strong it can survive translation. In our bodies we carry the ghosts of our parents and in our voices we reconcile and harmonise their forgotten dialects. The ideas of the past have stood the test of time, they appear carved in stone and immovable. Any complaint about this is either useful or not, an awareness of possibility as frightening as a confrontation with reality. Whatever happens a change will come.
Ooh it's been so long
It's been so long, a little too long
But a change has gotta come
I'm so tired, so tired of suffering
And standing by myself
And standing up alone
But a change has gotta come
You know and I know
You know that I know
That I know that you know, honey
That a change is gonne come (14)
My bones are rocks, my blood flows in the open as a stream, my hairs prick through the earth like grass, my fingers rooted into the ground. The moment of my planting is the time of my release, the oath that drives now given to those others who will carry on the vengence of history. The son could in this new play love the father. The howls of anguish at our parents’ deaths are not because of love, we cry over missed opportunities, the acceptance of something that should never have been accepted, the loss of familiarity and the inheritance of a total responsibility that will not unshackle itself until senility sets in. Acceptance is the hardest skill to learn, once learned a virtue but if not an ache of loneliness sets in.
Making sense of long dead texts, can be the same as holding a microphone up to the lips of statues, the silence of the stone is deafening. Now deaf to Marx and closed to his nineteenth century reason, we are left with only his spectre to guide us through the shadowy underworld of capital. But we cannot abandon him here, in a hollow place between a vanished world and a world not yet come into being. If you look again you will notice the messiah’s mouth is open, a black hole gapes beneath his nose, no light escapes from here, we must adjust our vision if we are to listen to this speech.
The three Marx are swearing in unison, “Bollocks, bugger, bugger, shit”.
12 J. L. Austin developed the concept that speech is itself a form of action, language being not just the passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular activity that can be used to invent and affect realities.
13 The crooked man is reputed to be the Scottish General Sir Alexander Leslie, his signature is on a covenant securing religious and political freedom for Scotland. ‘They all lived together in a little crooked house' refers to the fact that the English and Scots had at last come to an agreement, but like most compromises it felt crooked.
14 The refrain in the head is: A Change is Gonna Come Written by Sam Cooke (1963) and sung by Otis Reading as the third track on the album Otis Blue, 1965 Stax Records
Austin (12) was concerned to read our speech as acts, acts that could be pretence or real, authentic communication being suspect, the meaning being the use and how reality was changed.
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house. (13)
There is no point in trying to straighten this out. An embedded memory, its crookedness a rightness, that if eradicated erases what it is it be human.
We should not fight against our nature. The tragedy of birth is its sweet optimism in those short days before future voices rage against that blackest night of blood stained sheets and dark conception. Even the newly born have a past, a past cursed by the living when life is unendurable and swift death a blessed blasphemy.
The language of passion cannot be measured by reason, in wishing suicide we also end those other lives extended through our own, so easily extinguished when we die.
The son who wants to better himself leaves his small hometown behind, forgetting the responsibility of blood. This the origionary wrong, only made right by prodigal return. If the ties are severed a cancer is born, eating slowly at the bowels, a hidden spectre of regret, the hell waiting for every son who goes against his father. The renown we seek a poor replacement for a father’s blessing and recognition of our worth.
A text we loved in youth can seem a foolish verse in later years, but if excommunicated will still continue living in a neighbouring domain. If an idea is strong it can survive translation. In our bodies we carry the ghosts of our parents and in our voices we reconcile and harmonise their forgotten dialects. The ideas of the past have stood the test of time, they appear carved in stone and immovable. Any complaint about this is either useful or not, an awareness of possibility as frightening as a confrontation with reality. Whatever happens a change will come.
Ooh it's been so long
It's been so long, a little too long
But a change has gotta come
I'm so tired, so tired of suffering
And standing by myself
And standing up alone
But a change has gotta come
You know and I know
You know that I know
That I know that you know, honey
That a change is gonne come (14)
My bones are rocks, my blood flows in the open as a stream, my hairs prick through the earth like grass, my fingers rooted into the ground. The moment of my planting is the time of my release, the oath that drives now given to those others who will carry on the vengence of history. The son could in this new play love the father. The howls of anguish at our parents’ deaths are not because of love, we cry over missed opportunities, the acceptance of something that should never have been accepted, the loss of familiarity and the inheritance of a total responsibility that will not unshackle itself until senility sets in. Acceptance is the hardest skill to learn, once learned a virtue but if not an ache of loneliness sets in.
Making sense of long dead texts, can be the same as holding a microphone up to the lips of statues, the silence of the stone is deafening. Now deaf to Marx and closed to his nineteenth century reason, we are left with only his spectre to guide us through the shadowy underworld of capital. But we cannot abandon him here, in a hollow place between a vanished world and a world not yet come into being. If you look again you will notice the messiah’s mouth is open, a black hole gapes beneath his nose, no light escapes from here, we must adjust our vision if we are to listen to this speech.
The three Marx are swearing in unison, “Bollocks, bugger, bugger, shit”.
12 J. L. Austin developed the concept that speech is itself a form of action, language being not just the passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular activity that can be used to invent and affect realities.
13 The crooked man is reputed to be the Scottish General Sir Alexander Leslie, his signature is on a covenant securing religious and political freedom for Scotland. ‘They all lived together in a little crooked house' refers to the fact that the English and Scots had at last come to an agreement, but like most compromises it felt crooked.
14 The refrain in the head is: A Change is Gonna Come Written by Sam Cooke (1963) and sung by Otis Reading as the third track on the album Otis Blue, 1965 Stax Records
Sunday 23 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (5)
The fifth night
All our futures are our pasts overtaking our present. We know that the only realistic pledge is to the future, the shape forming events of yesterday are done and change will come, inexorably and absolutely, but if we are in tune with this transformation, it can be directed and channelled with our poetry and songs.
Deridda wants it both ways. Truth and lies, together and apart, black and white, secrets and transparency, the duality of opposites hiding the fact that all things are repelled from each other. As the distance between objects increases, so does their velocity, moving faster and faster, through the speed of light, eventually each point disappearing into horizon lines that are plucked from the centre of our own eyes. The ray of truth is only seen when looking eye to eye, an extramissionist belief (11) in non-refractive rays, but truth repels and has an unacceptable visage. Lines of sight are bent around large masses, the weightier the body the tighter is the bend, the greater the truth therefore the more distortion.
A threadbare bird hosts the last goose quill that will be used to write the world and pen Deridda’s poem of a future classless socialism. A dog watches.
To not act on what is seen to be the case is to hold off the future. But all futures come of themselves, we have no power over them, except the weak force of nostalgia. If the present is not connected to either the past or the future it can be the site of madness, lunar variations, causing the seas to rise unseasonably, the crops to fail, and cities to be emptied by the floods that rise.
There is at times a resonance between the people and an individual. A man or woman of the people, producing a song for the people, that is the song they need to sing that sets their hearts to beat in unison. By chance they hit the button, stroked the people’s G spot with their touch, no method acting genius but common application driven by a switched on mind. The genius is in the generosity of spirit. Invention fits the gap between the present and the future.
Time, history, the world are simply labels to hang our thoughts on. Each requires a transformation, each can metamorphose into the other without a pause for breath. In translation they shift faster, forms will twist and form again as their new master shapes them on the anvil of nationality.
1. The temperature of horses is sealed in their gonads.
2. The times are in traction.
3. The mode is in reverse.
4. This epilogue is dishonourable.
Disjointed is not unjust, it is simply a physical condition. Watching someone relocate a dislocated shoulder can be distressing, but for the double jointed an everyday activity.
11 Extramission theory: A belief that vision consists of rays of light emitted by the eyes that illuminate the world around us.
All our futures are our pasts overtaking our present. We know that the only realistic pledge is to the future, the shape forming events of yesterday are done and change will come, inexorably and absolutely, but if we are in tune with this transformation, it can be directed and channelled with our poetry and songs.
Deridda wants it both ways. Truth and lies, together and apart, black and white, secrets and transparency, the duality of opposites hiding the fact that all things are repelled from each other. As the distance between objects increases, so does their velocity, moving faster and faster, through the speed of light, eventually each point disappearing into horizon lines that are plucked from the centre of our own eyes. The ray of truth is only seen when looking eye to eye, an extramissionist belief (11) in non-refractive rays, but truth repels and has an unacceptable visage. Lines of sight are bent around large masses, the weightier the body the tighter is the bend, the greater the truth therefore the more distortion.
A threadbare bird hosts the last goose quill that will be used to write the world and pen Deridda’s poem of a future classless socialism. A dog watches.
To not act on what is seen to be the case is to hold off the future. But all futures come of themselves, we have no power over them, except the weak force of nostalgia. If the present is not connected to either the past or the future it can be the site of madness, lunar variations, causing the seas to rise unseasonably, the crops to fail, and cities to be emptied by the floods that rise.
There is at times a resonance between the people and an individual. A man or woman of the people, producing a song for the people, that is the song they need to sing that sets their hearts to beat in unison. By chance they hit the button, stroked the people’s G spot with their touch, no method acting genius but common application driven by a switched on mind. The genius is in the generosity of spirit. Invention fits the gap between the present and the future.
Time, history, the world are simply labels to hang our thoughts on. Each requires a transformation, each can metamorphose into the other without a pause for breath. In translation they shift faster, forms will twist and form again as their new master shapes them on the anvil of nationality.
1. The temperature of horses is sealed in their gonads.
2. The times are in traction.
3. The mode is in reverse.
4. This epilogue is dishonourable.
Disjointed is not unjust, it is simply a physical condition. Watching someone relocate a dislocated shoulder can be distressing, but for the double jointed an everyday activity.
11 Extramission theory: A belief that vision consists of rays of light emitted by the eyes that illuminate the world around us.
Saturday 22 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (4)
The forth night
Indentured academics inherit the tradition of reason, falling between the stools of impoverished logic and numerical discourse, while the poet communes with the ghosts of the dead and rhymes their conversations for the living.
Oppositions dissolve as you approach atomic or universal scale but only in song can their harmony be truly satisfied. Learning will never replace morning worship, a time when hymns can penetrate the membrane as a question. This is why young boys are never taught to think.
The conjuring of ghosts a Victorian parlour game, fake ectoplasm smearing the polished table; the spectre now glimpsed in the mirror of a waxy sheen, as it glides towards the wings of the stage. It exits left.
A manifesto for the dead was written by the dead and taken up as a flag of liberty for the living. A future proof text that at its core asks why it is we mine our fellow workers ‘til their skin falls into sunken chests and hollow cheeks, their empty stomachs sounding out the deepest ruptures of the Earth.
The law is now no longer Bible told, it shapes itself through ownership and use, the ideology of faith is walking off the stage. The audience are booing and the comic turn is here. He’s just as bad and even worse he tries to win them over. Jokes of sex and racist tales are nineteen eighties fare. They want blood and stamp their feet and off the stage he goes and out comes Marx disguised as Prospero. He offers up a magic gift, a gift to hold and cherish, its shape a loving cup, two handled made in red. Like the audience, its nature runs through our culture as letters through a seaside stick of rock. The audience forgive him his sins and he blesses them.
Only in Cuba did it seem as if the world's words were not corrupted. Stalin, monarch drawn, his urge for power a greater law than economic rights.
But these are old battlefields, looking out from the high castle over Europe, we now turn our eyes to the East. The iron curtain has parted; the scene and the actors have changed, the play within a play now staged for the benefit of Mister Right. Fukuyama, Mister Wrong, is writing for the press, a hungry press that seeks for confirmation it is right. CAPITALISM HAS NOW WON, the headline in his news, the bankers’ pockets bulge with pride, the underclass arise and gorge themselves on cake. The Bay of Pigs a turning point, a sixties pivot for a world of future Ragnoraks.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (10) teaches us that it is always the end of history, but tomorrow is a new day, a day when once again parliamentary democracy will shoot itself in the foot, but hobble on regardless.
“READ ME!”, pleads the text, if not it wont exist. Reading between the lines is what Marx taught us to do, but we sat in the library while a train of stinking overcrowded wagons rode the fast track to capital.
At the end of the line the three voices of Marx announce themselves; Marx the Father, Marx the Son and Marx the Holy Ghost.
The dog pricks up its right ear, it is listening for the future.
10 Hegel, G.W.F. (1979) The Phenomenology of Spirit Oxford: OUP
Indentured academics inherit the tradition of reason, falling between the stools of impoverished logic and numerical discourse, while the poet communes with the ghosts of the dead and rhymes their conversations for the living.
Oppositions dissolve as you approach atomic or universal scale but only in song can their harmony be truly satisfied. Learning will never replace morning worship, a time when hymns can penetrate the membrane as a question. This is why young boys are never taught to think.
The conjuring of ghosts a Victorian parlour game, fake ectoplasm smearing the polished table; the spectre now glimpsed in the mirror of a waxy sheen, as it glides towards the wings of the stage. It exits left.
A manifesto for the dead was written by the dead and taken up as a flag of liberty for the living. A future proof text that at its core asks why it is we mine our fellow workers ‘til their skin falls into sunken chests and hollow cheeks, their empty stomachs sounding out the deepest ruptures of the Earth.
The law is now no longer Bible told, it shapes itself through ownership and use, the ideology of faith is walking off the stage. The audience are booing and the comic turn is here. He’s just as bad and even worse he tries to win them over. Jokes of sex and racist tales are nineteen eighties fare. They want blood and stamp their feet and off the stage he goes and out comes Marx disguised as Prospero. He offers up a magic gift, a gift to hold and cherish, its shape a loving cup, two handled made in red. Like the audience, its nature runs through our culture as letters through a seaside stick of rock. The audience forgive him his sins and he blesses them.
Only in Cuba did it seem as if the world's words were not corrupted. Stalin, monarch drawn, his urge for power a greater law than economic rights.
But these are old battlefields, looking out from the high castle over Europe, we now turn our eyes to the East. The iron curtain has parted; the scene and the actors have changed, the play within a play now staged for the benefit of Mister Right. Fukuyama, Mister Wrong, is writing for the press, a hungry press that seeks for confirmation it is right. CAPITALISM HAS NOW WON, the headline in his news, the bankers’ pockets bulge with pride, the underclass arise and gorge themselves on cake. The Bay of Pigs a turning point, a sixties pivot for a world of future Ragnoraks.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (10) teaches us that it is always the end of history, but tomorrow is a new day, a day when once again parliamentary democracy will shoot itself in the foot, but hobble on regardless.
“READ ME!”, pleads the text, if not it wont exist. Reading between the lines is what Marx taught us to do, but we sat in the library while a train of stinking overcrowded wagons rode the fast track to capital.
At the end of the line the three voices of Marx announce themselves; Marx the Father, Marx the Son and Marx the Holy Ghost.
The dog pricks up its right ear, it is listening for the future.
10 Hegel, G.W.F. (1979) The Phenomenology of Spirit Oxford: OUP
Friday 21 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (3)
The third night's reading
The desire for knowledge is a condition predicated by the fact that we will at some time die. Why do we suddenly stop? What was at one moment vital and in close communion/communication with us is now as silent and cold as a stone. Where does that animated spirit go to once it leaves the body? At the base of all our questioning is perhaps the seeking after an answer as to why we must eventually die and how we reconcile ourselves to this. Mourning is perhaps just another form of question.
1 Knowledge can control the dead. We bind them into their graves with chatter, talk of accidents, disease, misspent years of dissolution and the fragile constitutions that were to be the cause of death. But unknown deaths will haunt us, deaths that fill the pages of the tabloid press, deaths inscribed in history books and deaths that we discover as we take the dog a walk.
2 The singing skull conjoins the past and future in one image. Its tongue articulated by lost muscles, its song echoing within a future auditorium of bone.
3 In work we save our souls. In work we sing our work songs, songs of the chains that bind the working class, swan songs of freedom chiming for a change.
When the fruit is rotten it’s time to plant the seed. The hard core is now ready to eat its outer coating, sucking nourishment from the teat of its own protection.
In following the father he is swallowed in the son’s wake.
Our lives are lived as repetition and copies, but for the living they are always new. When we are alive, each and every moment, even those seconds prior to death, are fresh minted and shiny. Each revolution of the Earth producing a new dawn, that for someone is always the first and for another the last. In this case the simulacrum is no weak copy. The repetition is renewal. All newborn animals set out with hope for the future, their strength and purpose unfurling as they grow. The fresh new copy pushes its head out through the soil and as it reaches upwards, raises itself up above last year’s fading cast off foliage.
Speaking with ghosts is a comfort when mourning; a prayer for forgiveness spoken quietly at the graveside.
The desire for knowledge is a condition predicated by the fact that we will at some time die. Why do we suddenly stop? What was at one moment vital and in close communion/communication with us is now as silent and cold as a stone. Where does that animated spirit go to once it leaves the body? At the base of all our questioning is perhaps the seeking after an answer as to why we must eventually die and how we reconcile ourselves to this. Mourning is perhaps just another form of question.
1 Knowledge can control the dead. We bind them into their graves with chatter, talk of accidents, disease, misspent years of dissolution and the fragile constitutions that were to be the cause of death. But unknown deaths will haunt us, deaths that fill the pages of the tabloid press, deaths inscribed in history books and deaths that we discover as we take the dog a walk.
2 The singing skull conjoins the past and future in one image. Its tongue articulated by lost muscles, its song echoing within a future auditorium of bone.
3 In work we save our souls. In work we sing our work songs, songs of the chains that bind the working class, swan songs of freedom chiming for a change.
When the fruit is rotten it’s time to plant the seed. The hard core is now ready to eat its outer coating, sucking nourishment from the teat of its own protection.
In following the father he is swallowed in the son’s wake.
Our lives are lived as repetition and copies, but for the living they are always new. When we are alive, each and every moment, even those seconds prior to death, are fresh minted and shiny. Each revolution of the Earth producing a new dawn, that for someone is always the first and for another the last. In this case the simulacrum is no weak copy. The repetition is renewal. All newborn animals set out with hope for the future, their strength and purpose unfurling as they grow. The fresh new copy pushes its head out through the soil and as it reaches upwards, raises itself up above last year’s fading cast off foliage.
Speaking with ghosts is a comfort when mourning; a prayer for forgiveness spoken quietly at the graveside.
Thursday 20 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (2)
The second night’s reading
Marx’s opening sentence carries the indelible traces of metastoicheiosis, (5) the orthodox tradition of trans-elementation that understands where the icon’s power comes from and opens the gates to material relationships with the spirit world. The spectral body of Christianity hovers over Europe and in its death throes it births a socialist child. The law is the law of God. The Ten Commandments brought down from the mountain by Moses, their form of solid carved, graspable but invisible edicts a text in God’s words, a reminder that we are all people of the book. (6)
Derrida speaks of the body without flesh, as if he desires to provide an answer to the Doubting Thomas amongst us who cannot accept that Communism still lives and who wants to poke fingers into its wounds to check and verify its health.
“I am my father’s spirit” an echo of the Holy Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed being his name, waiting for his kingdom to come, the language of the Bible and Shakespeare Desert Island reading for Marx, the man who grew up in a Jewish household, was the son of a lawyer and father of a belief system.
Lanark like (7) the body can develop a carapace of hard, scaly skin that can grow to encase itself until a point is reached when all feeling is gone. Its contact with the outside world eventually ceases, this armour its protection, inuring it from harm, ensuring that as a spectator it is not contaminated by the disease of feeling.
In the dominion of the dead all acts are acts of mourning, disembodied voices occupying the space of silence, which is itself shaped by the death of speech acts talking to the deaf. Only in work are we vital and alive. All there is, is work. (8) The labour of the working class a fond memory, the Earl of Dudley’s steelworks (9) long mothballed and mythologised in Black Country hearts, twinned in Heaven with the Ruhr, the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine.
A small dog whines in the dark, it is lost and cold.
5 Paraskos, M (2010) Regeneration Mitcham: Orage Press (Part 9)
6 In Islam, a phrase used to describe non-Muslim adherents to faiths that use a book of prayer, these are described in the Qur’an as; Jews, Christians, and Sabians and at other times as also followers of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Muslims themselves have also been described as ‘the people of the book’ because of their relationship with the Qur’an.
7 Grey, A (1981) Lanark: a life in four books London: Canongate
8 Cale, J and Reed, L(1990) Songs for Drella New York: Sire Records Track 4 'Work'
9 The Earl of Dudley Steelworks. One of the earliest Black Country steelworks founded in the 18th century and visited by German and French industrialists during this time when they were importing models taken from the British Industrial Revolution.
Marx’s opening sentence carries the indelible traces of metastoicheiosis, (5) the orthodox tradition of trans-elementation that understands where the icon’s power comes from and opens the gates to material relationships with the spirit world. The spectral body of Christianity hovers over Europe and in its death throes it births a socialist child. The law is the law of God. The Ten Commandments brought down from the mountain by Moses, their form of solid carved, graspable but invisible edicts a text in God’s words, a reminder that we are all people of the book. (6)
Derrida speaks of the body without flesh, as if he desires to provide an answer to the Doubting Thomas amongst us who cannot accept that Communism still lives and who wants to poke fingers into its wounds to check and verify its health.
“I am my father’s spirit” an echo of the Holy Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed being his name, waiting for his kingdom to come, the language of the Bible and Shakespeare Desert Island reading for Marx, the man who grew up in a Jewish household, was the son of a lawyer and father of a belief system.
Lanark like (7) the body can develop a carapace of hard, scaly skin that can grow to encase itself until a point is reached when all feeling is gone. Its contact with the outside world eventually ceases, this armour its protection, inuring it from harm, ensuring that as a spectator it is not contaminated by the disease of feeling.
In the dominion of the dead all acts are acts of mourning, disembodied voices occupying the space of silence, which is itself shaped by the death of speech acts talking to the deaf. Only in work are we vital and alive. All there is, is work. (8) The labour of the working class a fond memory, the Earl of Dudley’s steelworks (9) long mothballed and mythologised in Black Country hearts, twinned in Heaven with the Ruhr, the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine.
A small dog whines in the dark, it is lost and cold.
5 Paraskos, M (2010) Regeneration Mitcham: Orage Press (Part 9)
6 In Islam, a phrase used to describe non-Muslim adherents to faiths that use a book of prayer, these are described in the Qur’an as; Jews, Christians, and Sabians and at other times as also followers of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Muslims themselves have also been described as ‘the people of the book’ because of their relationship with the Qur’an.
7 Grey, A (1981) Lanark: a life in four books London: Canongate
8 Cale, J and Reed, L(1990) Songs for Drella New York: Sire Records Track 4 'Work'
9 The Earl of Dudley Steelworks. One of the earliest Black Country steelworks founded in the 18th century and visited by German and French industrialists during this time when they were importing models taken from the British Industrial Revolution.
Wednesday 19 January 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx
The first night's reading
Exordium
The responsibility we have as the living to honour our dead ancestors is something we cannot escape. Marx with all the dead ancestors lies behind the cave wall’s membrane (1) as a spirit, waiting to be contacted by the tribe’s shaman. Ancestors of thought are no less important than ancestors of blood; reverence being their due, which we perform through the shaping of our words in their image.
What is right, (justice) is a deep rooted tacit understanding of what it is to live. What it is to live is to believe in the future. To believe in the future of rightness is to live a proper life. A proper life is lived in harmony with the now and in remembrance of things past.
We become aware that someone in the distance is whistling for their dog, this has been going on for some time and the owner's whistle starts to sound anxious.
Injunctions of Marx
Pan European ghosts reside in Yorick’s skull, echoes of a vanitas of false value and a reminder of the ephemeral nature of our lives. The dignity of life is predicated on being aware of its fragility and still being able to shape its individual moments according to those ‘right’ values that stem from a belief structure. That belief is the link to a human core, a core that lies at the centre of history and the peoples of our past. Their beliefs sounding as silent music in our future empty skulls.
Time is only in joint when the levers for change have a fulcrum, the norm being a floating world between perception and reverie, action and dream. Only in the heat of revolution does time lever itself back into its socket. The spectre is that of change. The spectre is that of long forgotten first readings, the text of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, haunting our language and its possibilities far more deeply than the reality of the Communist project. At certain precise moments in Derrida’s life he would be standing on platforms that could support fulcrums of change, one of these moments would have been the moment immediately on reading “A spectre is haunting Europe” a moment all of us that have read that text have shared with him. The commonality of reading , a socialism of the text.
We are all living in our parent’s shadow. We are apparitions that walk in the shadow of former selves.
Arriving at his uncle’s house for his father’s funeral, as he walked towards the house, he was seen for the first time by his uncle who believed that this new arrival was his brother returned from the dead.
Our gait, our mannerisms and appearance all encoded and shaped by our genetic and cultural inheritance. I sing my father in my voice and shape my intonation through the ghost of Marx.
The ghosts of Europe are its poets and playwrights, their words echoing through our language and our daily speech, poetic memories shaping our thoughts as they arrive through our throats. Yates when asked where his poetry came from said it was made from a mouthful of air. As we open our mouths to speak, we release the ghosts of our literary past. The air shared by us all, both living and dead, is the same as breathed in and spoken out as our ancestors. Each of us in our own time playing out the consequences of our collective theatre. The Communist manifesto opens its first act in memory of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
For Derrida as with so many European intellectuals born before the Second World War, the real ghosts are those whose bodies are lost within the death pits of genocides, the missing millions being those who cannot be counted. (2) We all live within the domain of the dead (3); we cannot escape the many places where the dead cohabit with the world of the living, our lives being surrounded by the ghosts of our forefathers, our every movement an echo of others who had similar ticks and nervous itches, particular gaits and finger shapes, all passed down from father to son, from son to daughter, daughter to daughter and daughter to son, in genetic links stretching back into the African dawn of haplogroup G (4).
The spirit world was for our ancestors the world of the dead. The spectre is that creature that lays on the cusp between life and death, zombie like in its refusal to lie down. its otherness more frightening being out of joint with reality. In this image lies the imprint of another, of Christ pinned to the cross, between life and death, at that moment when the last breath escapes; “It is finished.” being his last earthly words as he passes from man to God. A moment of transformation of flesh into spirit, now embedded within the Catholic mass as the central plank of a religion founded on transubstantiation. The word made flesh is remade within the writings of Marx, economic argument transformed into belief.
The dog pricks up its left ear, it is listening for the past.
1 Lewis-Williams, D (2004) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art London: Thames and Hudson
2 Primo Levi: You count the living and the dead, the missing are neither alive nor dead and they cannot be counted. Levi, P (2000) If not now, when? London: Penguin
3 Pogue Harrison, R (2005) The Dominion of the Dead Chicago: University Press
4 The haplogroup G DNA strand is thought to have originated in the Middle East, and to have spread into Europe during the Neolithic period.
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