the narcissistic ties of blood

Ah, how I loathe the culture wars.  We are walking out of a battle field now, one on which the definitions of family were ravaged.  Here is a clearer view. 

 

The prevailing orthodoxy claims that family is foundational to good society and living.  They emphasize blood lines and values and remove their kids from public schools.  It is a loving inward gaze. 

 

The alternate view is that such self love can lead to territoriality and fear of the outsider.  And it seems that when asked, most people believe that family values means looking beyond the family.  Maybe that’s what loving your neighbour is: that to really love, we must look past ourselves, our bloodlines, our tribe, and try to understand and love ‘other’ people.  

 

Salon-The U.S. News article cited a 1997 poll in which 75 percent of 950 adults said moms with kids under 3 who work outside the home are threatening family values.

 

Coontz-You know these polls change from day to day depending on how they’re phrased. If you phrase the question, “Are women who work neglecting their kids?” the overwhelming majority will say no. In many cases, because it is the only vocabulary people have to express their concern, they’ll use the conservative term “family values,” but when you press people on what they mean by that, they’ll define it in a totally different way than the right wing does. The public defines it in terms of teaching your kids to look beyond the family. They define it in terms of reaching out to get involved in community activities. Whereas the right-wing definition of family values is extraordinarily narrow — even in terms of the history of Christianity. Christ was quite anti-family. He said that family bonds can interfere with your commitment to the larger Christian community. And the early evangelicals took pains to always talk about the Christian household, to indicate that you had to reach beyond the narrow, selfish ties of sexual attraction and the narcissistic ties of blood in order to look out for the larger community.
May 20, 1997

“Christ was quite anti-family”, STEPHANIE COONTZ ON THE WAY WE WEREN’T — AND ARE, Salon.com

starbucks-a-go-go

Here’s some light reading on one of my favorite pursuits.  I suppose you thought that cup of brown you slurp every morning is little more than the buzz you get.  Or, for the hardcore drinker, the chemical you need to keep from slumping over your desk after lunch.  How naïve!  Mental slavery!  As we will see, its much more than that.

 

Here, there are two arguments — imagine arguing over coffee!  One is that capitalism-pushers and puritans propagandized the use of coffee to wire us up.  The other is that the coffee house is the glorious space that is left after the entanglements of family, society and government are cleared out of the room. 

 

At first these two images appear to cancel each other out:  one occupies the world of desk-slavery and high! profit! margins! and the other slums it with really smart guys with white beards who can’t dress themselves.  But coffee probably does both things:  is the soma drug of choice for the prevailing system of work-gluttony (must work! more work!) and the catalyzer for speaking freely in a smoky room.

 

Historians of stimulants have tried to invest coffee with characteristics that would explain its agreeability to the bourgeoisie. Coffee does not contain alcohol and can easily be promoted as its antidote, as a means to maintain energetic sobriety and keep working, a disposition in line with the ascetic ethos of the agents of early capitalism.  There is no shortage of advertising material from the period to support such a view. Drawing on puritan coffee propaganda, the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch asserts that, with coffee, rationalism entered the physiology of man.  Its somatic effects associate it with the exhortation to constant alertness and activity.  However, to Habermas, the chemical constituents and invigorating effect of coffee do not play any overt role in the constitution of the public sphere. As a thinker with Marxist allegiances, he avoids the fetishism that seems to inhere in the genre of commodity histories, in which objects of consumption take on unexpected powers and become protagonists in adventurous narratives.  Yet no Marxist would believe that social relations can be neatly disentangled from commodity capitalism. According to Habermas, bourgeois individuals are able to enter into novel kinds of relationships with one another in the coffeehouse because the links between family, civil society, and the state are restructured under capitalist conditions.

~Coffee and Civilization, Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

we bore him away

“Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!”

 

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?”

~from W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in which he describes the Atlanta funeral procession of his infant son

safe at home

 

 

(haris panidis | saeco etienne coffee maker | electra coffee machine)

 

In this piece, the middle class, after having been harangued by Luther for their pursuit of comfort and sensuality, turn to the drawing room and its rituals of pleasure-without-risk, including the drinking of coffee.  It is at home where risk is erased.  The theorist Schmitt criticizes the middleclass for leaving broader social life and retreating into family life.  This life turned inward may be comfortable, but it marked by fear of the world outside and aversion to conflict.  In it, mother’s tut-tutting isn’t merely corrective; it’s sinister.

 

“In a note in his acrimonious postwar glossary, the legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt captures the stale atmosphere of the bourgeois interior, and points to coffee as a symbol of the desire to enjoy undisturbed security within the confines of the household:

 

“French: sécurité; German (until now): Gemütlichkeit. That is the internalized – or interiorized – but at the same time secularized assurance of divine grace, the end of fear and trembling at a nice cup of coffee and a pipe stuffed with spicy tobacco. It is the reappearance of well-concealed sensual enjoyment, after Luther and the Moravians raged against security as the actual form of sensuality.”

 

In Schmitt’s view, the typical bourgeois philistine, unmistakably portrayed in his entry, is not so much ascetically opposed to pleasure as he is wary of pleasure that cannot be enjoyed securely – that is – without worry. Coffee, in combination with tobacco, stands for intoxication without risk; it is a stimulant that does not dangerously loosen the subject’s self-possession. It signifies a furtive bliss distinguished from the ecstatic, which implies a movement transcending the bounded ego lodged in the safety of plush comfort.Yet the note contains a more far-reaching critique. Schmitt contends that the comfortable life in the bourgeois interior, despite its mundane and modest quality, seduces men into a sinful attachment to worldly enjoyment. The sinfulness resides in the pursuit of security: the will to achieve a state of complete safety in the shielded salon betrays a blasphemous belief in the possibility of a man-made utopia.

Schmitt’s diary entry might come across as a peculiar expression of a severe Christian ethos, but he joins a long line of critics of the bourgeoisie, who fault it for its incapacity to appreciate a community that extends beyond the realm of the family. The bourgeois individual typically believes that his real life plays out in the private sphere, and perceives the outside world as a foreign and dangerous territory. To the extent that the bourgeoisie does act politically, however, it continues to be guided by the desire for security nurtured in the home, and its ambition is to turn the world into a calm interior. To the bourgeoisie, conflict rudely disturbs the continual traffic of discourse – it should simply not take place. At this point, the bourgeois host’s call for the re-establishment of placid conversation – Nur immer gemütlich! or “Temper! Temper!” – sounds increasingly sinister.”

 “No Coffee” by Jakob Norberg from Eurozine

 

 

half remembered

Eithne Jordan
Peripheral Landscapes

“The images have a curious half-remembered or imagined quality which has an unsettling but very satisfying effect, like empty stage sets or movie stills poised and prepared for human activity or abandoned and discarded after use. This is a measure of the extent to which the subjects are merely a formal device for the artist to explore form, composition and perspective. The industrial zones and urban environments, melancholy spaces inhabited only by objects or machines, arise directly out of the Still Life paintings. They are, in one sense, giant still lives depicting monumental shapes in the landscape. In another sense they do audit the aesthetic of the world we inhabit, the motorways, garages and warehouses that serve our needs and become a passive part of our visual consciousness.”

~Galway Arts Centre, galwayartscentre.ie

 

subversive sacred

 

Here is an exquisite subversive definition of the sacred as articulated by the great Italian film maker Pasolini.  He describes the sacred in terms of what it is not:  the profane, namely the techniques and apparatus used to prop up the middle class.  Somehow for him stability, security, conservatism, the status quo, its trappings, pragmatism are not merely the machinations of the acquisitive lifestyle.  He has taken what we may typically see as neutral and necessary and spurned it, marked it damned.    

 

The sacred that impassions Pasolini corresponds to an anthropological concept of religiosity as studied by such authorities as Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, Georges Bataille, or Roger Caillois.  The holy is a phenomenon necessarily defined by remotion, that is to say negatively, in opposition to what it is not. If the profane is the world of security, conservation and useful and pragmatic behaviors designed to maintain the status quo, the sacred is the domain of an incomprehensible and vital force that holds the secret of Being itself. For this reason, the deepest human desire is to be empowered by the sacred, through sacrificial behaviors performed to gain favor (the sacred of respect) or through illicit behaviors designed to reach the limits of selfhood and the threshold of the cosmogonic realm (the sacred of transgression).  

 

~Pasolini’s tecnica sacrale in Accatone, Kathryin St. Ours, Goucher College

annunciation

Here are three works by the photographer Gregory Crewdson, all untitled, set in the generic suburb, landscapes and portraits, each with strong beams of light.  They question our normative assumptions of what is real by showing meta real events. 

 

The first is of a suburban neighborhood at dusk with stacks of railway ties in the foreground and several porch lights just on for the night.  There are three meta real lights:  the beam, the spot in the forground and the tree in the background.  All three light abjectly uninteresting subjects.

 

The second is a portrait of a woman perhaps in a dream, in her night clothes, simultaneously in her garden and in her kitchen.  She is a flesh and blood woman, fertile and organized. We see her in a meta real moment: conceivably the police have arrived, but more likely God or the Truth based on the intensity of the light.

 

The third is a pregnant woman in her yard at dusk in the suburbs, in the kiddy pool which her husband or boyfriend is filling with a hose while a friend sleeps on the lawn nearby.  The spot light is again extra human, like a renaissance annunciation:  a miracle birth in the yard.

 

Each image presents a narrative that collapses the distance between the banal and the transcendent wherein lies its power.

 

Untitled, from the series Twilight, Gregory Crewdson

untitled, Gregory Crewdson

untitled (pregnant woman/pool), Gregory Crewdson

three hour work day

(wilde | kierkegaard | sloths | sloth)

The line between sloth and doing nothing is very fine.  Sloth is loaded up as a sin whereas doing nothing can mean communing with people who matter, even God himself.

 

“Theories and polemics about sloth have figured widely in Western thought in the work of artists, philosophers, and cultural critics as diverse as Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Malevich, as well as Marx, Kierkegaard, and Wilde. In Dante’s Purgatorio, for example, sloth is described as being the “failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind, and all one’s soul.” A more secular viewpoint on sloth is provided by Paul LaFargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who authored the influential The Right to be Lazy (1883) and tirelessly campaigned for a three-hour workday. Likewise, in his manifesto in praise of laziness (1993), Zagreb-based artist Mladen Stilinovic suggests that Western artists are too preoccupied with promotion and production, and are thus less artists than producers.”

 

~from the Slought Foundation website

“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.” - Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855), Either/Or, Vol. 1

 

“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.” - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Critic as Artist

take one child, her blood, a candle, some bread

 

Unbelievably, the nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down is connected with human child sacrifice.  It seems rivers felt transgressed against by bridges and that the spirit of the offered child helped maintain functioning relations between the realm and governance of the city and that of the river.  And, it wasn’t only the Thames that had a blood thirst: apparently quite a few European rivers developed refined, and costly, palates. 

 

So, the child is set apart, taken from life, to mediate between human political need and the anger and unpredictability of a water god.  I guess it’s the innocence and purity of the child that the river wants, a perfect substitute, or at least something as close to perfection as possible.  And, in theory,  a child fits that requirement well. 

 

 

It makes me wonder whose family had to suffer, how that particular child was chosen, what was the relationship to society of the child and her parents before the murder, after the murder? One guess is low born, outcast, but just good enough (blonde curls?) to assuage the angry river.  A second could be zealous parents and possibly higher born. In either case, like religious parents who set aside one son for a lonely celebate life in the priesthood.

 

Except that she doesn’t mention the human sacrifices. It was apparently customary in the long ago and far away to secure a building or bridge through sacrifice to the deities of the area or river. The preferred offering involved children, their blood, or, if possible, the sealing in of a child with a candle and hunk of bread at the foot of the bridge. When the Bridge Gate at Bremen was demolished in the nineteenth century, the skeleton of a child was indeed found implanted in the foundations. Nor are songs about bridges falling down unique to Britain, with examples coming from Italy, France, and Germany. The idea behind the sacrifice was that the spirit of the youngster looked over the bridge using the light and stayed awake by eating the food.

In Romania it was believed that the sacrifice of a person’s shadow to a building or bridge would do the trick. People would be enticed to stand over the foundation and their shadow measured. This written measurement was then buried with the foundation stone. Sadly, it was also believed that the person whose shadow was buried in such a fashion would die within forty days of the building’s completion. So-called “shadow traders” still existed in Eastern Europe until the nineteenth century, and people would shout out warnings to those passing freshly erected buildings to beware in case someone stole their shadow. These are interesting, if gruesome, legends, but there is scant evidence linking London Bridge specifically to such practices.

“Rivers and child sacrifice,” you might scoff. “Dark Ages stuff!” Except that in the twenty-first century such practices still take place. On 21 September 2001, the headless torso of a young boy was found floating near Tower Bridge. He had been used as part of something called a muti ceremony, in which the body parts of a child are used for medicinal purposes or to bring good fortune to a business enterprise. Police throughout Europe believe that there have been perhaps a dozen such cases .

 

~from Heavy Words Lightly Thrown by Chris Roberts, Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA).

but down below there are desires

This is the egg head version of Dilbert.  I feel like I have lived this in every place I have worked in America, both large and small.  Deleuze and Guattari describe a two tiered world, a revealed so-called rational one of technique and control, and the other underground, libidinous, oppressed.  And there is a link – repressors want to be repressed, the neuroses of the hidden world percolate up.

QUESTION: When you describe capitalism, you say: “There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of *this* pathology, of *this madness*, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that’s where its rationality comes from. Does this mean that after this “abnormal” society, or outside of it, there can be a “normal” society?

GILLES DELEUZE: We do not use the terms “normal” or “abnormal”. All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It’s like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational — not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it’s mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn’t been adequately discussed about Marx’s *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is — the interests being defined in the framework of this society — the way people pursue those interests, their realisation. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true story is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today’s technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the “right” to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A “disinterested” love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.

 

~conversation about their book Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari