It still irritates the heck out of me when I hear someone say something, seemingly from a place of authority, which is either quite patently false, or with which I utterly disagree. This irritation tips over into mild fury when it concerns a topic in which I fancy myself (sometimes in error, I admit) to be reasonably well versed. The mitigating factor when face-to-face, however, is that one can look the person in the eye and remember that they, like oneself, are just finite flesh and blood, with a family, and bodily functions, and probably some decency.

This mitigating factor dissolves when such interactions occur on the internet, when one usually finds oneself in the presence of nothing but letters on a screen – and often quite stupid letters, forming even more stupid words, forming idiotic sentences. On these occasions, there is little chance of calming the fires of one’s righteous anger; indeed, if a picture of the individual in question accompanies these sentences, in light of the nonsense they have just spouted, the picture will take on an overall resonance of ignorant smugness… the general result being a profound impulse to want to punch the picture in the face.

Just such an occasion presented itself this morning while I was perusing Facebook, and it ruined my breakfast. I learnt a while ago that the internet is awash with idiocy, and have elected not to hang around on sites or blogs that represent perspectives on life that I deem to be obviously stupid. Facebook is different, however, insofar as people’s views, when spouted, rather invade one’s personal (virtual) space. When those views are disagreeable, they reveal themselves as an army of marauding barbarians who wish to rape and pillage the righteous townspeople of one’s mind. It seems plain wrong to let such things lie. I have, however, learnt that it usually makes things worse to enter into a dialogue, and so I am getting into the habit of refraining, mainly for my own sanity and mood. I have learnt that I become a bad husband when I do otherwise. The job of policing such intellectual crimes will have to be left to someone with more patience. I have retired.

(I am aware that my own views probably irritate people too. The difference, of course, is that I’m right).

I haven’t done one of these lists for a while (since March 8th apparently), so here’s a new, slightly longer one.

What I’ve Been Listening To:

Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
REM – Accelerate
U2 – Zooropa
Antony & The Johnsons – The Crying Light
Jeff Buckley – Grace

What I’ve Been Reading:

Kierkegaard – Repetition & Either/Or
Ivan Illich – The Right To Useful Unemployment
George MacDonald – Fairy Stories
Michel Henry – I Am The Truth
David Held – Introduction To Critical Theory

What I’ve Been Drinking:

An unusual amount of tea, often with a few ginger biscuits
Bodegas Salado Fina Blanca Paloma – a dry white sherry (well, technically a fortified wine ‘cos of the region, but that’s being fussy), which my sister & brother-in-law brought back for me from Spain
Dry ginger ale, again in unusual quantity
Rock Mild – the best mild I’ve ever had, brewed locally in Nottingham
Courvoisier VS – a standard, but very nice, cognac

It’s quite often noted that Dawkins and the rest of the fanatical “New Atheists” are not very highly thought of by more ‘reasonable’ atheists. Given that Dawkins has never come across to me as anything other than a complete idiot, however, I still find it fun to read what they have to say about him… if simply as evidence that my own opinion of him is not solely due to my theistic bias, but may actually be because he is – ontologically – an idiot.

As such, I offer the following article at The Guardian, by atheist philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse:

“Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute“

Enjoy!

Another music tip. Saw this northern band for the first time on Later w/ Jools Holland on Friday night; then watched their performances back a couple times on the iPlayer; then looked for their album on iTunes and found it for £4 (astonishingly cheap), and snapped it up. They won’t be everyone’s “cup of tea” (whatever the heck that means… surely an old colonial English phrase, as it kind of presumes the “cup of tea” is universally adored and represents heaven-come-to-earth for absolutely everyone. Anyway…), but once you click into what they’re doing, their stuff becomes pretty interesting. So far (about 6 tracks through the album), I like them.

This is one of the tracks they did on Later. The best part is where one of the other artists on the show, Maxwell, is briefly shown doing a little jig, with a rather funny smile on his face. Enjoy.

To my shame, even though he won the Mercury Prize all the way back in 2005, I’ve only just got round to listening to Antony & The Johnsons. Even that happened purely by chance when he and his current band turned up on the Channel 4 show Live at Abbey Road last Friday. Within a few days of being blown away while watching that, however, I had familiarised myself with most of his back catalogue, and decided that he was a musical genius – a modern day Bach.

Now, I’m pretty fussy about my music. There are a lot acts I like, but only about four or five that I truly love. The members of this prestigious latter category are distinguishable by the fact that, in spite of hours and hours of listening, I have never grown bored or indifferent to their music (or lyrics) and, even after the hundredth or so listen to a particular track, in it still hear something new and fresh and interesting. I have a sneaking suspicion that Antony & The Johnsons may eventually sneak into this category, as his music has a transcendental quality and a melodic and harmonic richness that seems unlikely to get old. This is only a hunch, though, as I could hate him in a few weeks.

Here’s one of the tracks from Abbey Road:

To know is to burst toward…

To be is to fly out into the world, to spring from the nothingness of the world and of consciousness in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world. When consciousness tries to recoup itself… it destroys itself. This necessity from consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself Husserl calls “intentionality”.

Knowledge, or pure representation, is only one of the possible forms of my consciousness “of” this tree; I can also love it, fear it, hate it, and this surpassing of consciousness by itself that is called “intentionality” finds itself again in fear, hatred, and love. Hating another is just a way of bursting forth toward him; it is finding oneself suddenly confronted by a stranger in whom one lives, in whom one suffers from the very first, the objective quality “hateful”.

So it is that all at once hatred, love, sympathy – all these famous “subjective” reactions which were floating in the maladrous brine of the mind – are pulled out. They are merely ways of discovering the world. It is things which unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, loveable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask, an inexhaustible and irreducible property which constitutes its very nature – and not the sum of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood.

Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions which would be inspired by this simple truth, so utterly ignored by the refined among us: if we love a woman, it is because she is loveable […] We are… delivered from the “internal life”: in vain we would seek the caress and fondlings of our intimate selves… like a child who kisses his own shoulder, since everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves: it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.

_{“Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea Of Husserl’s Phenomenology”
In: The Phenomenology Reader, pp.382-384}

A poem by Thom Gunn speaks of a German conscript in the Second World War who risked his life helping Jews to escape the fate in store them at the hands of the Nazis:

I know he had unusual eyes,
Whose power no orders could determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.

_{From Ideology, xiii.}

I’m still a relative newcomer to Žižek, having only read him on and off for about a year now. But I found this dialectical discussion of ideology helpful, even if it is very typically Žižekian, simply because it is so straightforward. It comes from the first of his essays in the Mapping Ideology book I mentioned in the last post:

“‘Ideology’ can designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure in false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power. It seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would expect it to dwell.

When one procedure is denounced as ‘ideological par excellence‘ one can be sure that its inversion is no less ideological. For example, among the procedures generally acknowledged as ‘ideological’, definitely the eternalization of some historically limited condition, the act of discerning some higher Necessity in a contingent occurrence (from the grounding of male domination in the ‘nature of things’ to interpreting AIDS as a punishment for the sinful life of modern man, or, at a more intimate level, when we encounter our ‘true love’, it seems as if this is what we have been waiting for all our life, as if, in some mysterious way, all our previous life has led to this encounter…): the senseless contingency of the real is thus ‘internalized’, symbolized, provided with Meaning. Is not ideology, however, also the opposite procedure of failing to notice the necessity, of misperceiving it as an insignificant contingency (from the psychoanalytic cure, in which one of the main forms of the analysand’s resistance is his insistence that his symptomatic slip of the tongue was a mere lapse without any signification up to the domain of economics, in which the ideological procedure par excellence is to reduce the crisis to an external, ultimately contingent occurrence, thus failing to take note of the inherent logic of the system that begets the crisis)? In this precise sense, ideology is the exact opposite of internalization of the external contingency: it resides in externalization of the result of an inner necessity, and the task of the critique of ideology here is precisely to discern the hidden necessity in what appears as mere contingency”.

He then goes on to give a number of other examples of how this works, the best being a comparison of the media treatments of the (first) Gulf War and the Bosnian war. With the Gulf War, rather than paying attention to the complex social, political or religious trends and antagonisms which informed the situation in Iraq, in the media the conflict was ultimately reduced to a personal quarrel with Saddam Hussein, “…Evil Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself from the civilized international community” (Žižek, quoting Renata Salecl [nope, never heard of her either]). The true aim of the war, as the media portrayed it, was Saddam’s own humiliation. That this functions ideologically is pretty obvious. Conversely, however, the media coverage of the Bosnian war (other than the occasional vilification of Slobodan Milosevic) consisted predominantly of accounts of the complex ethnic, religious and cultural background to the war, and the many unresolved historical antagonisms which gave rise to it. In contrast to the deeply personalized coverage of the Gulf War, media coverage of the Bosnian crisis, in an apparent reversal, invoked a definite distance from the conflict, the implication being that, “it is not possible to take sides, one can only patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, alien to our civilized system of values” (Salecl, again). Though this would initially appear to be more a considered, reasonable and informed account than that of the Gulf War, Žižek’s point is that it too functions ideologically. Indeed, it does so with “more cunning”, the evocation of complex circumstances and a certain distance delivering the West from any responsibility: “The comfortable attitude of a distant observer, the evocation of the allegedly intricate context of religious and ethnic struggles in Balkan countries, is here to enable the West to shed its responsibility towards the Balkans…”. The significance is that this latter, even more poisonous, kind of ideology is also better veiled, less obvious, more insidious than the former, almost caricatured kind. Very clearly, Žižek helps us to see how the most pernicious ideology is not always where it’s most expected… far from it, in fact.

_{(Indeed, later in the essay Žižek illustrates how the most [apparently] blatant forms of ideology sometimes fail to function ideologically at all, which obviously ties back in to his first paragraph at the top).}

I wandered into the Oxfam bookshop in Nottingham city centre the other day and made two excellent finds:

First, Rousseau’s Social Contract and Discourses, all together in one 350 page volume for just £2.49!! I’ve been reading up on my history of modern political philosophy over the summer, and so I’m quietly on the look out for cheap primary material from the likes of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, John Stuart Mill etc. and so this was a particularly good find given Rousseau’s importance in the field.

To add to that, just as I was congratulating myself on this particular find, I looked down and noticed a decent-sized book called Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, for sale for a mere £3.49!! On closer inspection I noticed the volume had a bunch of really interesting (and some classic) essays on ideology from figures including Adorno, Althusser, Lacan, Terry Eagleton, Seyla Benhabib, Rorty and Jameson, as well as two pieces by Žižek himself. I also found it funny that there was a picture of a bald eagle on the front. Needless to say I snapped that up too.

Not bad at all.

So it seems a carrier pigeon is still the fastest way of sending data in South Africa. Apparently a company in Durban decided to pit an 11-month old homing pigeon – called Winston – armed with a 4GB memory stick, against the ADSL service of the country’s biggest broadband provider, Telkom. Winston the pigeon carried the memory stick the 60 miles to his destination in just two hours, whereas in the same amount of time the ADSL had managed to send just 4% of the data. That’s a pretty resounding victory for Winston and the rest of pigeon-kind. So congratulations to him.

You can read the rest of the story HERE.