#Decline and Fall

[yeats-infection]

some malkmus / pavement screengrabs from 1992-4

frankfurt 1994 - reading 1992 - australia 1993 - london 1992 - rennes 1992 - bielefeld 1992

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anguish over the decline of civilisation is the affliction of a conservative. The leftist cannot lament the disappearance of something of which he is ignorant.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Ruins at Agrigento, Sicily, 1986.

[tilbageidanmark]

The saddest book collection in the library.

[quietparanoiac]

Pleased to meet you. Don't listen to whatever Florence has just told you. Do your own thing.

Decline and Fall (2017), 1x01

[asherelbein]

"We often believe that if a liberal state falls to fascism, the change will occur obviously and all at once. The blackshirts will arrive, sociopathic and garish in their clownish evil. The black banners will unfurl from the tops of buildings, in a clear sign that you are now oppressed. The fascists will come, somehow, from outside, overthrowing the old order wholesale.

This vision is a comforting lie. What actually tends to happen is a long slide along a previously existing continuum, a tightening of previously existing screws. Even as the new regime takes power, it will not always be clear what has and hasn't changed.

And so, in Andor, much of the structure of life under the newly-imperial Republic seemingly remains the same. The roughly hexagonal banner of the Republic fleet still emblazons newer models of the same sleek triangular warships, which patrol the same shipping lanes. The Senate still meets and politicks and horse-trades. The same corporations turn out the same familiar products; soldiers in the same bone-white armor still patrol the Outer Rim.

And if the ships and the banner are now symbols of terror; if the Senate is just a neutered country club for the exchange of favors; if those corporations now produce those products with forced labor; if the expensive clones who wore that armor have been replaced by cheap conscripts— well, unless you looked too closely, you might not notice..."

This week on Decline and Fall, our newsletter series tracking the intertwined tale of #StarWars and American imperial collapse: Saul Elbein and I checked in with Andor, Disney's superlative new series. Inside, you'll find discussions of continuity versus collapse, the legal fig-leaf, corporate graft and the Military Industrial Complex, and the double-edged nature of redemptive violence.

[heatdeathnews]

In the latest edition of Decline and Fall, we dig into the disintegrating politics of the terminal Republic, the nature of coups and purges, the boogeyman of American Empire, failure as a natural part of history, and what – precisely – it takes to make someone participate in an atrocity.

You can read the free edition – which is around 4,000 words – right here!

[duststooooorm]

this is fixing me

[sixohsixoheightfourtwo]

"Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it; I'm not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone... Now you're a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got on to the wheel, and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump."

evelyn waugh, decline and fall, 1928

[adnotocram]

Kinda dig the whole post apocalyptic Roman Empire destroyed aesthetic, overgrown ruins n all that shit

[yeats-infection]

assorted materials for the cranberries' third album to the faithful departed and single "when you're gone," 1996

[fabular-mr-fox]

I miss the way the internet used to be.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)(1958)

We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

[whatameshugenah]

The Battle on the Bridge

Arnold Böcklin, Basel 1827–1901

[quietparanoiac]

You see, I designed the house for human flow and increased functionality.

Decline and Fall (2017), 1x02

[asherelbein]

I'm busily working on the next Decline and Fall piece, part of a series that traces the decline of American empire through the lens of -- what else? -- Star Wars. We've reached REVENGE OF THE SITH, and this one is shaping up to be quite long. So, to whet your appetite, here's a little riff I wrote today on General Grievous.

Grievous is an interesting figure both in terms of design and thematics. A hulking, spider-like cyborg in a very fancy cape, he’s a pulp villain with glaring slitted reptilian eyes, squishy organs in his chest plate, and a bad cough. He’s certainly dangerous —he keeps a collection of lightsabers from dead Jedi in his cape. (The now-dubiously canonical Tartakovsky-animated Clone Wars underscores this with an absolute cracker-jack fight scene.)

But Grievous doesn’t really seem like an ideologue. He is, instead, generally shown to be a coward and opportunist. What was such a figure up to, before the outbreak of Galactic civil war? We’re never told, but we can infer: a professional general from the Outer Rim, or somewhere else beyond the borders of the Pax Republica. Someone akin to the mercenary captains of the Renaissance great companies: professional soldiers who kept an eye out for the main chance, and with a professional’s disdain for a fair fight. 

Grievous is also described — in the opening text and in conversation — as the “droid general.” This is, in part, a reference to his forces: those many marching battle droids churned out by the arms dealers of the Separatist alliance. But interestingly, people also talk about Grievous as if he’s himself a droid, rather than an organic being occupying a cybernetic shell. Interestingly, cybernetic prostheses don’t seem that remarkable in Star Wars: Anakin and Luke Skywalker both have them. But both also keep it covered by a glove. To the extent that we can draw conclusions from offhand decisions around design and costuming, open display of these sorts of prosthesis doesn't seem to be socially acceptable. Perhaps in the minds of Galactic citizens, any greater post-organic conversion — the sort that can’t be easily masked, the sort that reminds people of droids — comes with an implicit loss of personhood. 

Recall that droids occupy a deeply ambiguous position in Star Wars: impersonal threats, background workers, eternally subaltern. (Even those who are fully-realized characters —C-3PO and R2-D2 — express their agency in necessarily subversive ways, as befits eternal servants unable to act openly on their own.) As a cyborg, Grievous is thus a specific sort of threat to Republican order: a blend of the organic and cybernetic that has tipped decidedly toward the mechanical, living eyes glaring out of a droid skull like an indictment.

Want more DECLINE AND FALL? Interested in what we had to say about the other two prequels? You can find it right here -- in addition to plenty more -- at HEAT DEATH.

[heatdeathnews]

New on Heat Death! As part of our ongoing premium series on Star Wars and American empire, we're digging deep into Revenge of the Sith. (The first half, anyway. It's a dense movie.) The full 10,000 word piece, as with the others, is available for paid subscribers. In this free 3,000 word preview, we put prequel-era Obi-Wan Kenobi — and the order he serves — under the microscope.

He is the very model of the modern Jedi mastery His clothes all pressed, a deeply stressed emotional disaster-y (In leu of civil limb-chopping he'll just resort to blastery) That's what you get with Obi-Wan: a modern Jedi master, he!