#it's like saying that because liberalism exists we have to abandon all notions of historical materialism

[wowitsverycool]

how are these people out here thinking *society* can be scientifically analyzed but not the brain

[arcticdementor]

Woke anti-racism certainly appears to have taken on the trappings of religion. White people have been seen washing the feet of black people and asking for forgiveness, a ritual firmly in line with the Christian tradition. And terms like ‘white guilt’ and ‘white privilege’ are treated much as Original Sin used to be – things for which humanity must forever atone.

One person who has long been exploring the religious fervour of today’s increasingly moralistic politics is the essayist and author Joseph Bottum. Indeed, his 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, seems almost prophetic. There he argued that the demise of traditional Protestantism in the US has led liberals to transfer their religious beliefs, habits and passions into the political realm, moralising it in the process. Our age of ‘post-Protestantism’, he concludes, has eroded the boundary between the religious and the political, infusing politics with a religious mindset and discourse.

spiked’s US correspondent, Sean Collins, caught up with Bottum, at his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to find out what he makes of the contemporary political moment, woke anti-racism and the phenomenon of cancel culture.

Sean Collins: As you note in An Anxious Age, the collapse of Mainline Protestantism (that is, the older, non-evangelical Protestant denominations) in the US is striking. In 1965, more than 50 per cent of Americans belonged to Protestant congregations. Now it is less than 10 per cent. Why, in your view, is this collapse so significant for broader American society and politics?

Joseph Bottum: In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville identified the central current of America as a current of morals and manners. However much rival sects feuded against one another, there was this central current. And it is the Mainline Protestant churches which provided America with those morals and manners. (‘Mainline’ is a term that was created later, but we can apply it retrospectively.)

The Mainline churches helped define American culture in several ways. First of all, the churches were mostly apolitical, which has had a profound effect on American culture. For instance, there’s never been a great American political novel. The average French streetwalker in a novel by Zola knows more about politics than the heroes of the greatest American novels. What is it to be an American? At the highest artistic level, it is to be concerned about the cosmos and the self. Politics is incidental to Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. And that’s because Mainline Protestantism rendered politics secondary to what it deems is most important — namely, salvation and the self.

…

Collins: Right, so we now live in, as you put it, a post-Protestant US. But, if I understand your thesis correctly, you argue that the beliefs, mindsets and manners that animated earlier Protestantism have not been abandoned, but instead have been projected on to the political realm. A key transition you cite is the Social Gospel movement, which becomes more prominent during the 20th century. Then closer to our time Christianity gets stripped out altogether, and you are just left with social activism. Sin remains a preoccupation, but it has been redefined as a social sin, like bigotry and racism. Have I got that right?

Bottum: Yes. There’s an extraordinary point here. Walter Rauschenbusch [an American theologian and a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries] lists six species of social sin. If you go through the list, they are exactly what radicals are objecting to now: bigotry, the ignorance of the uneducated, power, corruption, militarism and oppression. It lines up so perfectly with today’s agitation.

What we’re seeing now is an amplification of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet. There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire. I perceived this when I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.

…

Similarly, there is ostracising and shunning. Cancel culture is just the latest and most virulent form of the religious notion of shunning, in which people are chased into further appreciation of their guiltiness. Two years ago, the Nation published a poem about an older panhandler giving advice to a younger one, about how to get people to give you money. The Twittermob went after that poem, on the grounds that the poet was a white man from Minnesota. And the magazine apologised, and the poet apologised for writing the poem. That’s what the shunning is looking for. If you profane, if you’re shunned outside the Temple, the only way back is to become fanatic, to convince people that you understand how guilty you are. And even then I’m not sure there’s any way back.

At the very least, one of the effects of the shunning is to frighten everyone into silence. Its purpose is to get people fired, to put people beyond the pale, to get them out of our sight. This is for a couple reasons. First, it is to ensure we are not infected by this sinfulness. And second, it is a public declaration of our power. It says, look how powerful we are, that we can do this to people.

…

We live in just the strangest times. But understanding the historical roots of these radicals as post-Protestant, and understanding the spiritual hunger which has no outlet for them, helps us to explain it. This is what happens when you have a Mainline outlook that is broken loose from all of its prior constraints. These ideas used to be corralled in the churches. If you let an idea like Original Sin – that’s a dangerous and powerful idea – loose from its corral, it goes to a place where it can exist, which is politics. One of the great dangers is that religious ideas are in politics. The line that I use is that, if you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion.

…

Suppose you analyse this class in terms of its members’ answer to the question, ‘How do you know that you are saved?’. In the past, people would say ‘because I believe in Christ’ and the rest of it. But the modern version of this question is, ‘How do you know you are a good person? And how can you have assurance of your goodness?’. Which is Max Weber’s question in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – and Weber says this anxiety about salvation actually has economic and political consequences. Let’s apply that Weberian analysis and ask what are the consequences of being worried about your salvation, phrased in today’s terms of being worried about being a good person. If it’s all about social ills, then you know you are a good person if you are opposed to those social ills, if you are anti-racist, even if you don’t do anything. You are convinced of your own salvation. You are one of the Elect if you adopt this stance of being opposed to the great sins.

Now, younger people are not going to put up with the hypocrisy of knowing you are a good person but not actually doing anything. And they are starting to be violent. Members of the Elect are much more economically and socially insecure than the elite, but they have the same education, they’ve got the same social markers. In some ways, we are seeing an intra-class warfare between the Elect and the elite.

…

Collins: Yes, today’s leaders in cultural institutions and universities seem to lack backbone. They have espoused this politically correct rhetoric for years, but it’s like they didn’t truly believe it or act on it, and now the younger generation are calling them on it.

Bottum: Right, the younger generation are not going to put up with the hypocrisy. That’s part of it. The second part is, when they see the old power figures tremble, they start thinking, why aren’t we in the positions of power? Then class elements, elitism, start to creep back in. But the original impulse came from seeing leaders like college presidents being hypocrites. They were just mouthing what they thought was just the latest line of the old liberal consensus. What they didn’t fully intuit is that the old liberal consensus was completely gone, and the new line had become something very radical. If today you were to put forward any of the shibboleths of high liberalism of the 1950s, you would be denounced as a terrible conservative.

…

Collins: I’ve also noticed a tendency to avoid detailed analysis of economic and social conditions, or concrete policy reforms. Instead, the issue of race after George Floyd is a simple moral denunciation, or a vague reference to ‘systemic racism’. You hear ‘Why do I have to keep explaining this?’, ‘I’m so exhausted’, and so on, as if the issue was beyond debate.

Bottum: Right. But also it’s defining the Church. It’s a way of saying you either have this feeling or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re evil, and if you do, you’re good. Christian theology, and Christian spiritual practice, has dealt with this for millennia. This is the distinction Calvin would make between justification and sanctification. The idea here is that we no longer need to argue it, because any argument of it is engaging with people beyond the pale. They are outside the Church, they are the profane. They are just wrong. What are they wrong about? They are wrong in the central feeling of moral goodness. This is the attempt to get others to shut up.

We are living in the age of the ad hominem. The fundamental way to answer a claim is to say something about the person who said it. Whether it’s a tu quoque, or an abusive ad hominem, or poisoning the well – the ad hominem is a whole genus of different species of fallacy. How do we know others are wrong? They are wrong because some bad people have said it too. Bari Weiss [the former New York Times op-ed editor] must be wrong [about the illiberal environment at the Times], because Ted Cruz forwarded her tweet. That’s a wonderful ad hominem – guilt by association. It’s not about the content of what is said, it’s about the people who said it.

Why should Trader Joe’s give in, and say how stupid and guilty it was for not realising the error of its ways? Because otherwise its managers and staff are not good people. It doesn’t matter if there is any objective truth to it. The only thing that matters is where you stand. Are you one of us, or are you one of them?

If I can show that you are one of them, then your only response is to apologise abjectly, even though you didn’t know. You didn’t know that touching your middle finger to your thumb is making a white power symbol. It doesn’t matter whether you knew that. A Hispanic driver for a power company in California got fired because his hand was hanging out the window, with his finger touching his thumb. A women photographed it and declared it was the white power symbol, and the power company fired him. It’s really astonishing.

…

It’s not enough to be one of the good guys, to be on the right side. You have to be bulletproof against any charge. You have to be constantly abject. You have to agree with your condemners, or you’re evil. The [French philosopher] Merleau-Ponty wrote about this in terms of the Moscow showtrials – about the psychological process by which people can come to confess their own guilt about something that, at some level, they know they are not guilty of. So the psychological aspect is interesting. But this mode of permanent abject contrition is best understood in its religious modes. This is what you get when the Church of Christ becomes the Church without Christ, and these old Protestant concerns enter the public square, enter politics, divorced from and freed from their old constraints. To paraphrase GK Chesterton, the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad.

Collins: Why does the Elect have to go as far as to ‘cancel’? You could imagine a movement promulgating certain moral ideas in society, and hoping to win converts. Such a movement wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to purge others, who didn’t agree with them, from their workplaces and colleges. What drives the Elect to go to those lengths?

Bottum: Look, you wouldn’t want a Satan worshipper turning up at your Church on a Sunday. You would drive them out. But of course these people don’t live in churches any more. This is what happens when those old ideas break loose and become modes of behaviour in politics. They don’t want these people in their church, but their church is politics. Their congregation is Twitter. They want these people not to exist, they want them banished. There are the power reasons for this: look at how powerful I am; I am a 17-year-old kid, and I had a major US corporation kow-towing to me. But there’s also this kind of religious sense that we can’t let sinners into the church. That’s what shunning was for, to get people to confess their sins, to realise their sinfulness. That’s what we’re doing now – it’s just that the church, the locus of faith, is no longer your congregation on Sunday. It’s public life.

This demand that politics somehow solve everything is an apocalyptic, religious sense of politics. For hundreds of years American jurisprudence has worried about the impact of religion on politics. What’s really extraordinary is that it is finally happening – politics is becoming religionised – but it’s being done in the name of anti-religion.

[shakespearesglobeblog]

Was Shakespeare gay? 

February is LGBT History month. On 7 February we opened Edward II, Christopher Marlowe’s portrayal of a homosexual relationship between the King Edward and Piers Gaveston. Running alongside this production is Voices in the Dark: Pride, Then and Now; an exciting exploration of sexuality and gender.

Research Fellow Will Tosh often has discussions with students and visitors about Shakespeare’s sexuality. In this blog, he tackles this question and sheds fresh light on how we might perceive Renaissance sexual identity.

Was Shakespeare gay?

It’s a popular question from students and audience members at public talks. Revealingly, it’s often posed in ways that draw attention to the debate: ‘I’ve been told that Shakespeare was gay – is that true?’ ‘I asked my teacher if Shakespeare was gay and he said no – what do you think?’

The answer’s more complicated than you might think.

It’s not that it’s exactly hard to find a homoerotic sensibility in Shakespeare’s works. Think of the ties of romantic friendship and erotic yearning that bind Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, or Antonio to Sebastian in Twelfth Night. That play is a queer fantasia, to be sure: Olivia loves Viola, thinking she’s ‘Cesario’, and ends up with Sebastian – who looks the same as Viola; Orsino falls in love with ‘Cesario’, not realising he’s a she, and seems absolutely delighted that she stays in her men’s clothing after he’s proposed.

We often read Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an account of the poet’s intense relationships with a beautiful young man and a bewitching ‘dark lady’. Lots of people find the poems simply too passionate, too obsessive, to be anything other than poetic autobiography. Oscar Wilde certainly thought the Sonnets contained a secret, suggesting in his essay-masquerading-as-a-story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ that the fair youth was ‘none other than the boy-actor for whom [Shakespeare] created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself’ (his youthful good looks must have lasted the best part of fifteen years if the same boy created the female lead in Romeo and Juliet in 1594 and Cymbeline’s Imogen in 1609).

Wilde might have veered into fiction with his identification of Shakespeare’s lover, but many readers are still reluctant to discard the notion that the Sonnets offer a glimpse of the ‘real’ Shakespeare. The poet Don Paterson writes in his recent commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets that they are literary proof positive of his bisexual or gay identity.

The complexity arises from the language and terminology we use to describe the sexual identity of historic people. For one thing, our modern words for sexual orientation – gay, straight, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual – are all nineteenth or twentieth-century coinages. Comparable words used in the past – ganymede, catamite, ingle for men, tribade for women – didn’t carry precisely the same meaning.    

Even more complicatedly, scholarship has insisted since the 1980s that sexual orientation is a modern concept. Most historians are of the view that early modern people didn’t think of themselves as gay or straight (not that those words carried their modern meanings in any case). Sexuality wasn’t so much about the gender of one’s object of desire, but about the degree of license, debauchery and sinful abandonment that an individual permitted oneself. Although we can talk about sexual acts in the past, we probably shouldn’t think about people’s sexual identities.

It might sound odd, but this can actually be a liberating way to think about sexuality. I’ve found it enlightening to think about the ways in which same-sex eroticism and queer emotion were woven into early modern society. What we now specify as homosexuality was infused into the culture at large, in customs, practices and social institutions. Widespread same-sex bed-sharing, the high value placed on single-gender friendship, and a generally un-prudish attitude to bodily functions created an environment in which homosexual acts, while technically illegal, went virtually unreported and unpunished.

Disapproval loomed, of course, as well as hostility from the church, but social history research suggests that the more usual response to same-sex intimacy was a worldly shrug, as long as it didn’t frighten the horses (or challenge society’s rigid gender roles).

But I still feel a bit caught out when someone wants to talk about Shakespeare’s sexuality. And I think it’s because ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is actually a really apt question. It’s not the ‘wrong’ thing to ask, and I’m beginning to wonder if it really is so anachronistic to think about the sexual orientation of historical people. I’m not sure I’m satisfied any more with our rather convoluted academic discourses about sexual subjectivity. When we queer the whole Renaissance, we obscure genealogy. The LGBTQ woman or man of today who seeks in the past for ancestry instead finds a well-meant dead-end: we are told that one of the things that makes us who we are did not exist four centuries ago.

The words we use to describe emotions, selfhood and sexuality have changed over the centuries, but I’m yet to be convinced that an early modern person with a prevailing sexual interest in their own gender wouldn’t have thought of themselves as distinct from the majority.

For what it’s worth, when I point my literary gaydar at Shakespeare I get a maybe. The dramatist who gave us the playfully queer wooing of Orlando and ‘Ganymede’ in As You Like It also created happy hetero couple Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. As a sonneteer, he was able to imagine a complex and anguished affair with a young man, as well as an obsessive, even controlling, relationship with a woman. Perhaps it’s more interesting to think about Shakespeare as a writer who knew that his audience and readership was sexually diverse: he was catering to the LGBT market long before such a thing had a name.   

But that’s not to say there weren’t other writers of the time for whom homoerotic subject matter and sexual identity seem to our eyes to overlap. The playwright Christopher Marlowe (whose Edward II is on now at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) and pastoral poet Richard Barnfield produced works that explored same-sex love in much more candid ways than Shakespeare. And we know for a fact that Shakespeare read these writers. So he may or may not have been gay, but he definitely read gay literature – and that’s a lesson we can all appreciate during LGBT History Month.

Edward II photograhy by Marc Brenner 

[neonbluebell]

Reminder: The “political compass” and “Horseshoe theory” are intentionally inaccurate pieces of propaganda

It’s a device designed to give political validity to ideologies that lack coherency and consistency with their espoused values, and is slanted to look favorably on Right-wing ideology.

Prior to the growth in popularity of the political compass (pictured)...

...the world and it’s people conceptualized the political spectrum like this....

...Although, please keep in mind that this version is modernized. Conservatism, prior to the United States adaptation and use of the word, meant something closer to (but not the same as) Traditionalism, and tended to include more neo-classical virtue-ethics-y sort of stuff, for example. But we’re talking in the here and now, and being simple and accessible whilst being accurate to current usage of the language is more important. Now, chances are, you’ve seen this same chart bent around to look like this...

...which is why “Horseshoe theory” is called what it is. It’s implication is that the far Left and far Right have more in common than the center does. This idea came from the 20th century proliferation of theory based on the work of Lenin (who is the basis of Maoism, Stalinism and despite his separatism from the Bolsheviks, Trotsky) and it’s implementation. Whilst socialism had existed, both in societies and as varying social theories for thousands of years, this new wave of thinking presented a radical departure from the norm - it posited that social hierarchy and authority, particularly the state, could be used to create liberty. By utilizing authoritarian power for the good of the people, rather than the good of the state, social order and financial plenty could both proliferate. Once people grew accustomed and happy with the new state of affairs, the state would no longer have to regulate and organize due to people wanting to keep things going as they are, and the state would become redundant and whither away. Thus, “Authoritarian Leftism�� was born, a new and untested theory that became incredibly popular for a wide range of reasons. Perhaps foremost among them was that this theory engaged with a real problem - for plenty to exist, social stability needed to be maintained, something that was constantly being upturned by imperialistic invasion, looting and colonization in the nations where it became popular. The USSR was born out of German imperialism, the CPV was born out of French and American imperialism and the CCP was born out of British and Japanese imperialism. But, outside of resisting imperialism (which these new social structures were actually very good at. The fact that North Korea still exists is testimony to that), the reality of this theory was far different. Socialism/communism (two words that historically mean the same thing, though in the post Lenin era, communism came to have additional authoritarian connotations) are by definition control of the means of production (the places where things are made, and skills are performed. Workplaces, essentially) and by the working class rather than an owning class, and the holding of raw resources in common. In no nation that adopted these ideologies did this happen. Control over the means of production was in the hands of “workers councils”, who were essentially elected representatives of the working class. The problem with that was that these people, by joining these councils, effectively were no longer members of the working class. They controlled and administrated the means on production, effectively acting as a new owning class, and replicating the problems that existed under capitalism. These councils were in turn beholden to the state, meaning that true power was far from the working class, and instead resided with an elite ruling class. And, unsurprisingly, elite ruling classes care very little about the people, and terrible atrocities occurred. And here is where we see Horseshoe Theory begin to fall apart in entirety. If it wasn’t EVER socialist or communist, regardless of what they called themselves, well... It wasn’t ever socialist or communist. And as such, placing these ideologies alongside far Left ideologies is a mistake. Because other far Left ideologies actively resisted authoritarian “communism” when they realized what it was actually about.

This flag is the Iron Front flag, also known as the Antifascist Circle. It is an incredibly popular anarchist insignia. The three white arrows represent what they are resisting - Nazis, monarchist and communists (again, the phrase in context means authoritarian “communists”, not socialists). It’s from 1933. The far Left rejected authoritarian “communists” from the very beginning, or at least before anyone else except the fascists. Similar movements sprung up within the USSR - Anarchist sailors, realizing that the Bolsheviks weren’t who they had said they were ideologically, held up in an act of resistance at Kronstadt naval base.  Their demands included freedom of speech, the end of deportation to work camps, a change in Soviet war politics, and liberation of the “worker’s councils” from Bolshevik control. They were killed to a man with machineguns. The Black Army, revolutionary anarchists who had been major players in the revolution were denounced and killed. Authoritarian “communists” have ALWAYS been the enemy of the rest of the far Left. Now, if authoritarian “communism” isn’t socialist/communist, and is an enemy of the Left wing, and created a hierarchical society dominated by unquestionable absolute rulers supported by armies of secret police under a regime that was an enemy of any of it’s people considered socially undesirable? It isn’t similar to fascism. It��s just fucking fascism. And saying that fascism and fascism have a lot in common is obvious, because it’s all Right wing ideology. But what of the most famous fascists, the Nazis? You know, the National Socialists. Well, this one is simple - did the workers control the means of production, or was it a capitalist nation where those controlling the means of production were only beholden to the state? The answer is the latter, just like the USSR and their ilk. They were by definition NOT SOCIALISTS. This is an important thing to internalize, that what people label themselves is a matter of optics and political convenience, especially when dealing with populist movements. We understand this when we discuss nations that call themselves democratic, but are not. It’s exactly the same for socialism and communism. With this groundwork laid, let’s (finally) talk about the political compass. As has been established, the upper Left quadrant is in fact the upper Right quadrant. The lower Left quadrant exists, the upper Right quadrant exists...

...But what about the lower Right quadrant. The libertarian Right? Well, the “libertarian” Right (yeah, you know what those quotation marks mean already, don’t you?) operates under the notion that hierarchy occurs naturally, and providing that such power was not gained via or is not used for coercion, intimidation, violence or otherwise, is just and fair. This is the Non Aggression Principal (NAP) that is the heart of “libertarian” Right thought. It’s intent is to maximize freedom, whilst having a clear framework for where your freedom ends and another person’s begins, whilst protecting a core Right wing value - the right to create legacy (To assure that your kith and kin will be cared for by allowing and protecting your rights to personal and private property ownership, especially capital (again, the places where things are made and skills are performed) and raw resources). Involuntary taxation is therefore categorically a violation of the NAP, and within this framework of thought, equatable with theft. Regulation of industry is considered coercion, and violates the NAP. Socialism, which would abolish private property (ownership of capital and raw resources) but allow the retention of personal property (the house you live in, your car, your shoes, your toothbrush) is considered theft. Indeed, the only compatible economic system with this economic system is unregulated, free-association, “laissez-faire” capitalism. And this is exactly where “libertarian” Right ideology becomes incoherent. Because we hadlLaissez-faire capitalism in the Industrial Age. Your unregulated factory that you have knowingly built to be dangerous to cut costs is not ethically different from booby trapping your yard, and looting anyone who's killed. You are knowingly exposing people to danger for profit. And providing you stick warning signs up that state it’s dangerous, you haven’t violated the NAP - because they posit that people freely choose to enter these spaces. They are exposing themselves, according to this logic. The inevitable monopolies that come without regulation of capitalism and MASSIVE taxation on the wealthy mean that capitalists can quickly own whole towns and cities. And they are inevitable, as the best business practices under capitalism are to pay the least you need to in order to retain your workforce, maximize profit, and to prevent your workers (who know the industry) from being able to get enough money to acquire their own capital and become a competitor. If you control all the money, all the food, all the shelter, etc? When people can't afford to live, to eat, to have a home, that's explicitly your fault. And no, they can't just leave to go work for another overlord who's offering better pay, because they have no money to move. At best, they can flee as effective refugees - and that means you've got to abandon your possessions you can't carry, risk hunger, thirst and exposure on the road, etc. Forcible relocation is violence, institutional disenfranchisement is violence, the inability to be free to pursue happiness is violence. It's not all truncheons and guns. Women, PoC, people who are openly queer all face issues of harassment, violence, disproportionate pay and more in our current environment. How's it going to be when no-one is stepping on the neck of bigots? People with disabilities, especially severe physical or developmental disabilities, are already shoehorned into poverty by our society. What happens when they're effectively ruled by a multi-billionaire who only sees value in people as labor tools? Right “libertarianism” is liberty only for an elite, wealthy class of rulers, who regardless of the NAP wield truly absolute power. And what do we call a social arrangement that explicitly hates the Left wing, has absolute rulers, and that disenfranchises, harms and kills “undesirables”? That’s right! It’s fascism! And this is why the political compass is propaganda - Three quarters (3/4) of it contains the ideology of fascism. It’s fascist propaganda. So, if the bottom right corner of this compass is actually the top right corner, we’re left with this...

...Or, if we clean it up, this...

...And if we polish it up and add our detailed data...

We end up back where we began, with an easy to understand political spectrum that makes perfect sense. So why was it over-complicated? What was the end goal of such an action? Well, once you get to this point, something becomes apparent - the dichotomy is between liberty and authority. Between equality and hierarchy. Between sharing and hoarding. Between fighting to uplift ALL of your fellow human beings, and fighting to uplift yourself at their expense. It’s because, once you reach this point, it becomes apparent that it’s as simple as good versus evil. That being a Leftist is an ethical responsibility. And I’m aware that that’s a HUGE assertion to make. But if you call a spade a spade, and stop playing games with language and semantics, this is the only conclusion I can rationally come to.

[derstheviking]

On the Liberation of Mental Illness

The mental health system is exactly where the ruling class wants it. A neoliberal political system needed a neoliberal form of therapy for the elites of capitalist society to continue their ideological subjection of the lowest strata of the working class, unemployed and lumpenproletariat. This imposed behaviorist worldview takes the form of an intra-personal therapeutics rather than a social, political, or historical analysis of the conditions which lead to the alienation of the individual in their unique social context. The institutionalization of cognitive-behavioral therapy within psychotherapy is directly opposed to any sort of political program for the liberation of the mentally ill, has no political basis whatsoever, and can hardly be called a “social science” by any stretch of the imagination. Abandoning key psychoanalytic concepts such as the unconscious motivations behind the transference neurosis, the repression inherent in the individual, and the ego’s defensive operations, we can only use terms like “irrational thinking”, “cognitive deficiencies”, and “cognitive distortions” to describe the needs of the client. These terms assume that there is a version of “reality” that can be unproblematically adapted to and which stands as an objective measure of health. To understand why cognitive-behavioral therapy is incompatible with any sort of structural change, just look at CBT’s cognitive triad where “negative views about the world” lead to “negative thoughts about the future” which lead to “negative thoughts about the self”. Not only is this relationship not clearly causal, but if political ideology leads to negative thoughts, then we have effectively eliminated any form of resistance against the conditions which enslave us.

Abandoning key psychoanalytic concepts such as unconscious motivations, the transference neurosis, repression, and the ego’s defensive operations, we can only use terms like “irrational thinking”, “cognitive deficiencies”, and “cognitive distortions” to describe the needs of the client. These terms assume that there is a version of “reality” that can be unproblematically adapted to and which stands as an objective measure of health. To understand why cognitive-behavioral therapy is incompatible with any sort of structural change, just look at CBT’s cognitive triad where “negative views about the world” lead to “negative thoughts about the future” which lead to “negative thoughts about the self”. Not only is this relationship not clearly causal, but if political ideology leads to negative thoughts, then we have effectively eliminated any form of resistance against the conditions which enslave us.

A disturbing number of psychiatrists align themselves too closely with prevailing alienation and invalidation that society imposes upon the patient in the psychiatric setting. This well-intentioned act of betrayal refuses to engage in critical awareness, becoming engulfed by the day-to-day indoctrination in the hospital or psychiatric clinic. A great number of people do not go into psychiatric treatment willingly, and those who do are often disillusioned, especially those seeking a form of spiritual guidance. David Cooper notes that psychiatric treatment imposes a paradox; on one hand the patient is expected to conform to the passive identity of being a patient, while on the other hand, every act, statement, and experience of the person is ruled invalid according to the “rules of the game” established by his family, and later by the psychiatrist, nurse, therapist, etc. Within capitalist society, there ranges forms of control from “insinuated degradation”, to exclusion from certain schools and jobs, to total invalidation, to mass extermination. The public conscience however is so strong that it demands an excuse for such forms of exclusion.

When Deleuze and Guattari shook the foundations of psychoanalysis with their criticism of psychoanalysts as “sinister priest-manipulators” in the 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they had little idea that the paradigm that would come to dominate psychotherapy in the 21st century would be that of a far worse adversary, behavioral modification. The very idea of behavioral modification completely invalidates or denies the existence of the complex inner world of the individual in their unique social context, the social dimensions of existence exerting an affect on the individual and the reciprocal relationship between the environment and psyche, as well as ignore the importance of past experiences in general; this would all be abandoned for the cognitive-behavioral focus on the then and now. It has been written in biographical accounts of Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, that he had no mental illness himself, had no bad memories, had no traumatic experiences, and when he trained as a psychoanalyst, ignored these basic teachings, and instead theorized concepts such as automatic negative thoughts which existed only here in the present moment. Aaron Beck had the nerve to ask his patients during sessions, “What are you thinking right now?”, if there was a silence in therapy. Deleuze and Guattari write, “The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience…it is because death, according to Freud, has neither a model nor an experience”. Moreover, it is not an easy task to teach someone to think differently, instead Freud’s metapsychology consists of catharsis, resolving dynamic conflicts, making structural changes to one’s environment, and to find an outlet for psychic energy. While CBT follows the lead of ego psychology and speaks of the “adaptation” of the individual to “reality”, Lacan says that psychoanalysis is the “exact opposite” of anything to proceeds by adaptation. Jung identifies four types where adaptations become problematic: adaptation entirely and exclusively to the outside, while entirely neglecting the inside; a disturbance from a preferential adaptation to the inside; adaptation to inner conditions, exclusive adaptation to the outside; and neglect of the outside in favor of adaptation to the inside.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy’s psychopathology is centered around the failure of the individual to engage in “reality-testing”. Lacan spoke of the Real as that which defies signification, and according to Lacan, language fails to function as a transparent medium for the flawless communication of intersubjectivity, the Real of excessive jouissance continually threatens to disrupt the balances and compromises between the reality principle and the pleasure principle by overriding the superego and the mediating structure of representations; structuring subjectivity contains intrinsic impasses, contradictions, and instabilities. However, Lacan speaks of the point de caption at which the signifier and the signified are united at an “anchoring point”; he says that in the normal individual exists several of these anchoring points at which reality is subjectively constituted and the signifier (with punctuation) stops the otherwise endless movement of signification, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning.

The pitfalls of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm are much more pernicious than simply rejecting the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis. From a sociopolitical perspective, CBT is brainwashing an entire generation of people to believe that they have no power over problematic social conditions in their communities. Paulo Freire argued, with his school of critical pedagogy, that a ‘critical consciousness’ must be developed by the student and that education was fundamentally a critical process; as we cannot escape the idea that Cornelius Castoriadis prominently outlined of the intercourse between psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and politics. He gives his account of the efficiency of the unconscious: “I mean animals never do stupid things; they do the things they have to do, right? They are instrumentally efficient and we couldn’t say that they are conscious in the usual sense of the term. And humans are conscious and, at the same time, monstrously irrational. All of human history is there, from the beginning to this very day.”

Perhaps Freud’s greatest contribution to psychiatry, the unveiling of the unconscious, drives and instincts, is grossly simplified by the cognitive-behavioral technique, the unconscious meaning to them simply “thoughts or actions that are below our conscious awareness”, a complete debasement of the actually existing metapsychological topology of the human psyche, and a further rejection of existing dynamic conflicts which manifest themselves. Cognitive-behavioral therapy specifically teaches that negative emotional states do not actually arise from “negative activating experiences” but are due to irrational or negative beliefs about the self. How can cognitive-behavioral therapists be so blatantly deceiving and nullify the entire sociological idea of social context? It almost resembles the Orwellian notion of “doublespeak”.

The reality of situation we are facing is that involuntary mental health treatment is the norm of society, and in a large number of cases people are committed by their families against their will. Therefore, many individuals have no choice but to “go along” with mental health treatment. While most diagnosed individuals are not criminals, the county jails are the largest providers of mental health treatment in the country; this fact allows us to speculate that it is the conditions of oppression that lead to pathological consequences. How many of these individuals did not need medications before they were institutionalized? The same sort of paradox can be seen with those held in mental hospitals involuntarily, where the institution itself creates a form of negative transference that often enrages the patient to the point that they act out and are placed in restraints or forcibly given medication. These patients which may be agreeable outside the mental hospital, suddenly become extremely disagreeable inside the mental hospital. And finally, the family situation exerts an enormous influence of the individual.

Yet we are experiencing a great revolt against these forms of biopsychiatry which tell us that we have ���chemical imbalances” in our brains. Wilhelm Reich and Lacan both understood that whole societies have pathologies and unlike Freud, they believed in no form of normalcy, saying that neurosis (as opposed to psychosis) was the most normal form of mental structure that exists. Foucault realizes the many forms of power, and anarchism has since long before revolted against all forms of power, authority, exploitation, domination, hierarchy, etc. How can we create a critical public consciousness based on forms of universality, which allows people on the individual level to greatest realize their true human potential, their existential life-project, and an end to their suffering?

The neoliberal mental health system has proved inadequate in treating the vast pathology of society in many ways. First of all, involuntary hospitalizations are completely unethical and hordes of people are deemed “a threat to themself or others”, roughed up by the security staff, held against their will, possibly taken in by the police or their family; we must always give people the option of staying at a hospital voluntarily. The 1960s saw a cultural revolution across China, Europe, and the United States, and with the mental health clinics at La Borde, Kingsley Hall, and Villa 21, it shows that it is possible in a revolutionary sense to change the existing forms of control that the mental health system propagates, as isolated as these examples are.

What we need is a revitalization of the classic trajectory of anti-psychiatry, excavating for ideas about a better future for our current mental health system than the bio-cognitive-behaviorist paradigm that dominates Western psychiatry and therapy. The path forward is obvious, we need the institutional critique of the institutional psychotherapy movement in France in its radical communist fashion to change the circumstances of the masses, but we need to change the way we look at the diagnosed patients of mental health facilities, stop enforcing stigmas against the disabled, and a communist program is the way forward for the liberation of this group fully, because until all people are equal and guaranteed a job and their needs met at a fair standard of living with the formation of new organizations of power politically that give direct participatory power over ones surroundings to the individual, with delegates that act to facilitate deliberative, organizational, and administrative tasks, but subject to direct recall if circumstances change. From the micro-politics of the mental health clinic to a political revolution, to finally achieve equality and cooperation between people, and the rising up of the proletariat to the ruling class.

Many therapists make clear that political issues such as electoral politics are “off limits” and that personal issues are what is to be dealt with in treatment. What frightens therapists most about political discussions within therapy is the fact that they are responsible for taking an ethical position; Lacan says that there is “no such thing as an ethically neutral position”, therefore disclosure about one’s own political beliefs becomes inevitable. There has been an increase in the amount of clients who want to talk politics. What is to be argued, is that sociopolitical topics not only have a determining influence on the patients unconscious, but that ideology has unexpectedly overwhelming effects on the patients experience and therefore must be dealt with in therapy. It becomes apparent that it is not so easy to separate what is ideological from what is personal.

Originating in the 1960s as a second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political”, is in a phrase the basic argument for why psychoanalysis has revolutionary potential in changing the social order. In 1913, Otto Gross declared “The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of revolution: i.e. this is what it is destined to become because it ferments insurrection within the psyche, and liberates individuality from the bonds of its own unconscious. It is destined to make us inwardly capable of freedom, destined to prepare the ground for the revolution.” Gross, an early colleague of Freud and Jung, held that the main conflict in the psyche is the conflict between the self and the other, an idea that he credits Nietzsche with discovering, the pathogenic influence of society on the individual.

[restoftheowl]

Does Culture need Humans?

Abstract: The pinnacle of evolution is culture which guides the evolution of humanity, by ruling genes through memes. The following text was published in what was to be Encyclopedia of Internet Memes and Phenomena and ended up as the Hungarian version of the same. Translation by the author.

If there's anything harder to accept than humans are descended from apes, is that we are descendants of apes and we are not the pinnacle of evolution. The assertion that on the top of the evolutionary tree we find culture, is peculiar not only because it de-biologizes the Darwinian system to some extent, but also works really well with the extremely biologized interpretation of memetics.

The insides of a coat

The phenomenon, which scientific terminology calls culture - and common language would rather use the word civilization - is key to human existence. This existence means the whole infrastructure of survival, from drinking water supply system down to individual level: that while on colder climate an animal grows thicker fur, man puts on a thick coat. The genetic answer expressed in fur was replaced with a complex object, composed of the technology manufacturing textiles with various qualities, patterns of construction, logistics, fashionable colours and brands. Coats created by culture are not only the result of their own evolution, they go beyond natural body covers in their space of application and their information/genetic background. Is it a real possibility, that humans were tailored to fit this coat, (or to be more general) this hyperevolutionary environment?

The fact that within human inheritance culture is of the most importance was pointed out by the father of immunology, Nobel-laureate Sir Peter Medawar. In his lectures titled The Future of Man we see vivid memories of the rise and fall of Nazism: Medawar states the primacy of culture, and warns of the reckless overuse of notions based on genetic analogies and the pseudo-scientific biologization of human beings.

"The conception I have just outlined is, I think, a liberating conception. It means that we can jettison all reasoning based upon the idea that changes in society happen in the style and under the pressures of ordinary genetic evolution; abandon any idea that the direction of social change is governed by laws other than laws which have at some time been the subject of human decisions or acts of mind. That competition between one man and another is a necessary part of the texture of society; that societies are organisms which grow and must inevitably die; that division of labour within a society is akin to what we can see in colonies of insects; that the laws of genetics have an overriding authority; that social evolution has a direction forcibly imposed upon it by agencies beyond man’s control—all these are biological judgments; but, I do assure you, bad judgments based upon a bad biology." (Medawar, 1959)

Our question now is how one of the latest theories of cultural evolution, memetics relates to the above mentioned bad judgments.

By today the meme concept has become a part of common vernacular, since despite its abstract nature it grasps the phenomena of high speed communication of the information age excellently. Memetics started its life as a playful interdisciplinary application of Darwinian logic. As the father of the concept Richard Dawkins, himself an admirer of Medawar, puts it:

"I am an enthousiastic Darwinian, but, I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.  The gene will enter my thesis as an analogy, nothing more. What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators." (Dawkins, 1986)

It's immediately apparent that the only way to avoid - despite Medawar's warning - the direct and aggressive genetization of culture if we the analogy of genes "only" on the basis of replication. The way of memetics from here on seems to be taking a path to being a information theory burdened by phobias, while in public conscience, which tends to handle the abstractions of analogies most economically, remains view of the direct genetic operation of culture, including misconceptions like memes are alive, because they replicate like viruses - while viruses are not viewed as living organisms precisely because of their dependence on a host for replication.

Domesticated replicators

Having not much to lose, at this point we take the liberty of meddling with Dawkins' concept and come out with a brutalized interpretation - slightly akin to the commonly held concept - , and see where it takes us if we view memes as simply cultural genes.

First of all, we need to take into account, that if we look at a DNA sequence we don't see any genes, since genes are abstract entities, sections defined by their function. Memes can be defined the same way - the efficient performance of their function and their cooperative benefit of which give them resistance against entropy. This also means, what we think of as a meme, encloses those not readily transparent details carrying psychological functions, which are the actual cultural genes.

If memes are a the part of cultural DNA, culture is literally alive, an informational organism, the environment of which consist of creatures capable of communication. We are now beyond the approach that sees culture as a construct invented by man to be able to fully convert his superb and energy expensive brain to actual survival. The viewpoint that culture is a secondary, artificial environment also changes: our connection to this environment is based on mutual benefit.

Multicellular organism is more than a bunch of cells. Evolution of cooperation requires adaptation by taking up communication, along with the differentiation of inner and outer environment, that is the definition of the borders of culture.

Biological adaptation to the circumstances of cooperation means that humans evolved adapting to culture moving ahead of them: by the way of memes culture forced the persistence of qualities keeping it alive, like the decrease of aggression, the drive for increasing efficiency of communication and other social capabilities. Thus being adapted to the symbiosis with culture means our origins are to be found in both monkeys and a cooperative informational organism - though we need to keep in mind that the above mentioned monkey is already a product of adaptation to culture to high-degree, since the evolution of information as a non-trivial direction for adaptation follows life all the way.

To put it another way: memes are primary and genes follow memes. The potential for the survival and reproduction of a cat (more specifically a modern internet connected cat) is directly proportional to the memetic potential of its eccentric, funny, or cute appearance. An even better example would be homing pigeons whose genes are expressed in superior navigation abilities, for which they had been domesticated to serve as a channel of - sometimes vital - communication.

Game theory views cooperative evolutionary solutions as an ethological question, instinctive reactions to external circumstances, and while it's role in evolution is acknowledged, it would hardly view culture - be it either an abstract or an actual living entity - as a sovereign, non-genetic part of evolution. Thus our present train of thought certainly appears to fall on the esoteric side, however to its defence we can say that even if it genetizes a bit here and there, the integration of culture within evolution is not one sided, and also doesn't go against Medawar's warning, being based on the priority of culture.

The future of human face

Let us introduce some questions to our suggested new life form.

Can man have a direct influence on culture? Our limits conform the laws of reproduction of memes, and the survival of the culture. What makes it even harder is that the function and consequences carried by the memes are presently not exactly known. Memetic complexes that have deeper influence on culture, such as ideologies (particularly failed ideologies) are considered to be very important by humans. The historical knowledge of the average person usully far more exceeds their knowledge of natural sciences - also in the general sense knowledge of history and identity are considered to be cultural knowledge.

A unique group of these memetic complexes are religions, the vital function of which is balancing hyperevolutionary pressure and human biological existence, serving as an interface, enabling the human evolutionary needs to appear in culture, in coordination with the political goal of collective survival.

How long does culture live? Does it get old? Can it break a leg? We have ample information about disappearance, disintegration, or fragmentation of cultures. We mostly describe their fate in biological metaphors. Culture and all known cultures can be seen as self-correcting scalable network immune to human tampering, however it could be the case that Nazism was not be the last example of a culture viewing human destruction as necessary, having been poisoned by memes of scientific origin.

Is there culture without humans? From the viewpoint of culture humans can be replaced by the any life form having the appropriate qualities. Even though potential sentient life in the universe would not necessarily have a humanoid form - in case of a contact we'd find a lot of social functions, mechanisms, and values that would look human to us.

Based on all this what is the future would we like to see? Humans avoiding obsolescence would be a nice thing, and the ability to coexist in culture with non-human - probably artificial - intelligence, and before that acquiring the ability to coexist in a culture with other humans.

by Viktor Papdi-Pécskői

[dimartblog]

—by Dorothea Konteletzidou*—

About his work, which haw been acclaimed since 1979, Cy Twombly offers little information, admitting that he intentionally ascribes a mysterious power to certain words and images. Influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and Old Word past, the artist came by way of initial process of exploration and investigation to adopt a plastic sensibility that conveys the essence, which is the gesture.

Of course, in no way does his abstract tendency parallel that of american abstraction, despite the fact that in 1950, having already met Robert Rauschenberg, he realized that the painting surface interested him as a surface on which no physical visual experience takes place except a working progress of execution.

Still life, Black Mountain College, 1951

Twombly is an adherent to gestural painting and is opposed to every notion of representation.

His 1953 reference to automatic writing seems to have liberated him from every cultural consideration.

His pictorial “image” corresponds to an inner spirit that has led him to those sacred childhood years when the child, drawing and scribbling, shifts his thoughts away from any speech and image.

The gestural trace becomes the representation of the artist’s thinking, the absence of signifier is replaced by the presence of being. The non-signifying thought is for the artist the first stage before the crystallization, before and culture convention.

At the time, young Twombly was moving in search of the essence, the invisible, which would lead him to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls “perfect Harmony with the nature”.[1] Motherwell’s theoretical exploration (for him art had to spark contemplation of fundamentally concerns life, the “essence”)[2] led Twombly to continue his investigations into creative activity at the expense of the illusion.

His image records his gestural movements, setting up a personal relationship between the image and the product. The result is that the “scribblings” of this period function as starting points to artistic creation. Twombly has mentioned his specific concerns for the pleasure in what takes place, thereby literally impelling the instinctual dynamism of his gestural movement to reveal a forgotten memory.

With his reference to automatic and gestural writing, with the vibrancy of his gesture, with his intense scribblings, Twombly goes beyond Pollock’s chicken scratches and drippings. Pollock, in his denial of al personal history, all experience and know-ledge, created a tabula rasa in his desire to approach the collective subconscious.

Letter of Resignation, 1969-1967

In contrast, Twombly does not categorically deny the connection between consciousness and the mechanisms of subconscious. For him the touch of the hand-via the itinerary of thinking and surface, the base of thinking- is fundamental, since it brings creative thinking into direct contact with human life.

He neither seeks to express nor to represent a reaction or an emotion; he simply uses the picture surface as the base for all the movements of his mental life and thinking, so the gestural writing becomes the means of expression that allows him to leave his traces.

Twombly’s 1975 installation in Rome confronted the organic union of past and present that is history. With a cultural tradition, “be it about an idea of God, be it about an idea of man” the Old World,linked to the consciousness of historical time, “emphasizes” for the artist the violence of time through historical monuments that are nothing but “ a degenerate and distorted past”.[3]

Compared with poetry of the monument and ruins, the reference created by their decay turns them into “objects”.[4] Offered up to his gaze, they are testaments to the absence of the sacred. Works of man, they demonstrate the dissolution of form, and abandoned, secluded, reintegrated into nature, they end up being constant reference for Cy Twombly.

 Roma (1957) does not portray the city, but takes on an end in itself as writing. “Words have the power to make thinks disappear, to make them appear as disappeared, appearance which is that of a disappearance, presence that returns to absence…”[5]

Untitled (Bolsena). House paint, crayon and pencil on canvas, 200 χ 240 cm (Collection Nicola del Roscio).

Leda and the Swan. Oil, pencil and crayon on canvas, 190.5 χ 200 cm (Private Collectίon, on loan to The Kunstmuseum, Bonn).

In other words, one could regard the image perceived and represented by Twombly, vested with time and experience, as not the same as the one the ancients perceived.

The artist apprehended what knowledge dictated to him- which is nothing more than a piecemeal knowledge of the reality presented- so that the ruins, the inscriptions of the funerary steles, worn by time, leaving few traces of their former meanings, appear in his work without any near past. At last visual language comprises the painting’s main image, so that even the dim shadow of the past appears via the glow of the pictorial image.

As substantial change appeared in his work with use of alphabet script, since up until then his writing was intended to describe personal experience.

By using words as monads reflecting the nature of words, Twombly clarifies language proper as the work, allowing the person, the artist, to appear in a second reading.

The period of the seventies has been characterized by Roland Barthes as the manifestation of “a remembrance, an irony, a posture”; by Roberta smith as a determination to render life through Greco-Roman mythology. Neither of them, however, elaborated on the direct relationship between the artist and the myth.

According to Levi-Strauss, “myth is always the discourse on the origin, the story of the foundation”[6] where legitimacy and arbitrariness, reality and images blend without any particular distinction to define modern man just as easily as they do the man of antiquity and his gods. But in the telling, it dissembles and in this way is unable to reconstruct a “representation that is already distance, loss”.[7]

Twombly’s consequent return to myths, to the genesis of the world, produced a loss of the notion of the primordial myth. Narcissus, Venus, Dionysus, Leda are subjects in which the artist, though a process other than that of imitation, effects a dual reading: one of painting, one of the text.

In Mythologie, Roland Barthes notes that each “object” is open to society’s appropriation and can pass from a real historical state into an oral state, and thus come back to “life”.[8] The object in this case, the myth of Narcissus, appropriated from the artist’s imagination, returns via a personal way of seeing. Distance from all iconography, the artist sets the viewer free to alter the original myth, since his writing defines but an idea.

“Writing is added to speech, affixed like an image or a representation, “writes Derrida, so that, presented as a mirror of speech, it compromises the representation of immediate thought. The result lies in the determination of (indefinite) speech as myth, defining it by plastic means or writing. With the creative act, Twombly detached the myth from the “sacred space where it is preserved”,[9] there be creating in a visual space his own other “myth”, that of the work.

The “myths”, such as Dionysus (1975), Venus (1975), Pan (1975), Orpheus (1975), detached from their identities, are surrendered to a personal appropriation of their meaning that differs from that of classical painting, whose aim is the representation of the “real”.

Classical painting structures its language by the following concepts: the signifier (which encompasses figures, object, forms, lines, colors, perspectives, etc.), the referent (meaning that real to which a similar organization refers) and the signifiant (the symbolic speech that unites the signifier to the referent). These are concepts in which there is a subject of writing and reading that decodifies the picture’s code, referencing a story  (religious, secular, etc.). This painting has a constant relationship to the sign, for the pictorial sign is permanently in reference to the real (sign), and in this manner guides thinking with the assistance of the pictorial signifier towards something else, which is the narrative. But knowing that “the most faithfully represented thing is no longer present”,[10] we find ourselves faced with not only a probable change of narrative, but also with an absence of the thing that the painter initially wanted to represent.

Finally, by attempting with visual materials to ignore this absence, classical painting ended up referring with the aid of the signifiant to a sign other than the primary one. Its language since then has referenced a religious or other type of thinking in which speech, as in language, is Being.

Thus we observe that this visual language references the great absence that takes the form of God. The thing that classical painting presents, says Marc Devade, is that which is absent.

In other words, the classical picture doesn’t only exist in the space of its essential representation (pictoral object-real object), but through its visual code it evokes a significative process that impels an interpretation, a “ becoming” text. Just as religion is the interpretation of the Divine Word, likewise visual writing in classical painting refers to a symbolic word; it guides us to what existed in the beginning, to the Divine Word.

Thus Cy Twomly writes names, sometimes rapidly, sometimes nonchalantly, illegibly or not, in an attempt to bring into the space of painting those who are essentially absent. With no reference whatsoever to the real, the artist demonstrates that writing, his writing, helps him to that non-real, other world of Gods. This time it is not through a pictorial sign that the painter wants to narrate, as occurs in classical, but through the letters that directly reference speech.

In contrast to what occurs in classical painting, Twombly has no need of the referent, of a real, because on the one hand, the essential referent as sole reality is the word itself, and on the other, his writing in the form of line that transforms into linear phonetic notation-uniting vocal sounds-references that which preexisted: the Gods.

So if his writing is clumsy, nonchalant, and/or even calligraphic, it does not hinder what he himself wishes to present within the pictorial space: speech, sound, the beginning.

“Each line is inhabited by its own history, it does not explain, it is the event of its own materialization”[11], Twombly remarks. And is detaching the line from the word he frees it from the sign, from the language, in an effort to also utilize and create the pictorial space.

His writing, whether lectical or not, “in ceasing to be the prose of the world”,[12] become free. By producing the visual autonomy of the signs, the artist structures the space in the work around what truly compromises it: words, letters.

As opposed to the Futurist, for who writing had to be readable since it formed the basic element of equilibrium between the visual signs and the ideograms in the work, Twombly appropriating writing, infiltrates the space of graffiti art, where words comprise the plastic syntheses of production of the work. The point of reference in his creative act is not the liberation of words so as approach the immediate language of reality, but the appraisal of the plastic writing behind the names, behind the words.

“Of writing, Twombly keeps the gesture, not the product”[13] In the end, it is the artist’s gesture does not divulge the act of painting (translator’s note: in Greek to paint is a synthesis of to live and to write), since gesture is a pause, an interruption, and not the projection of the self, as we presume.

On this very point also lies the reason for its existence; the significance of the instantaneous painting act registers the moment in time when it acts, not earlier, not later.

Before the “arrival” of the final moment, the gesture is the sole manifestation of the artist’s being, noting however, in its passing the stoppage of time of the past- in other words, death. As a result, the writing exposed to the eyes does not contain life, nor does it manifest the trace of the painting act. What is left of this gestural act is the work itself. By means of plastic syntheses, it constitutes the sole presence.

Cy Twombly’s art has no wish to be either dedication, nor translation of an idea or sentiment:

He creates without appropriating He acts without expecting anything His work accomplished, He does not cling to it, And since he does not cling to it, His work will las.

(Tao Te Ching)

Untitled. House paint and wax on fabric and wood with twine, wire and nails, 39 χ 25.4 χ 10.1 cm (Collection Robert Rauschenberg).

* * *

[1] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Oeuvres completes. Ed. Gallimard, Paris 1981.

[2] Scarpetta, Guy: Robert Motherwell, Art Press. July, 1977.

[3] Mortier, Roland: La poetique des ruines en France, Ed. Librairies Droz, Geneva, 1975.

[4] lbid.

[5] Blanchot, Maurice: L ‘espace litteraire, Ed, Gallimard, 1955.

[6] Levi-Strauss, Claude: Anthropologie structural, Ed. Plon, Paris, 1974.

[7] lbid.

[8] Barthes, Roland: Mythologies. Ed. Seuil, 1957.

[9] Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques: Art, Mythe et creation, Ed. le Hameau, 1988.

[10] Derrida, Jacques: De la Grammatologie, Ε . Minuit, Paris, 1967.

[11] Barthes, Roland: L’Obvie et l’Obtus, Ed. Seuil, Col. “Tel Oue,” Paris, 1981.

[12] Foucault, Michel: Les mots et les choses, Ε . Gallimard, Paris, 1977.

[13] Barthes, Roland: L’Obvie et l’Obtus, op. cit.

* Dorothea Konteletzidou is an art historian, Phd of theory of art

The text is part of her thesis: L’ écriture alphabétique à l’œuvre de Cy Tombly, 1989, Strasbourg

First published in Arti, v. 23, σ.108-122, Αθήνα, 1995

Cy Twombly in Rome, photo by Robert Rauschenberg, 1952

* * *

More dim/art in english

  Cy Twombly: The Deconstruction of Painting through Gesture —by Dorothea Konteletzidou*— About his work, which haw been acclaimed since 1979, Cy Twombly offers little information, admitting that he intentionally ascribes a mysterious power to certain words and images. 

[cryptswahili]

Glen Weyl Isn’t Vitalik But He’s Its Next Best Hope

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Dr. Glen Weyl speaks with the calm of a man who has history on the mind.

With an unbroken gaze and an unambiguous delivery, the author, economist and Microsoft researcher calmly espouses a clear and revolutionary vision: that the world’s hierarchies can be challenged and reconceived with the power of markets.

But if his theories were trapped before in the pages of academia, in 2018, Weyl has captured the imagination and devotion of the leading minds in ethereum, and, by extension, what is likely the world’s largest cryptocurrency community. It has so far been the perfect match for the co-author of “Radical Markets,” whose collaborations with developers may soon enable his ideas to escape the page in ways he never conceived.

It was no surprise then to see Weyl at Devcon4, the annual ethereum conference in Prague in October, where he was running on three hours sleep.

At the time, Weyl reported to having given 73 talks in the previous six months alone. Just in from the UK, his trip had brought him to Belgium, Denmark, Norway and France – a series of dates he jokingly compares to a Rolling Stones tour.

Still, they don’t all get the fanfare of his Devcon talk – which he defined as a “rally cry” against individualism; here it’s met with blustering applause from the audience. As a speaker, Weyl has no shortage of charisma – a trait he brushes off as “an unfair advantage” among developers.

This charisma is no doubt helpful given Weyl’s sometimes obscure ideological inspirations. He sees himself as seeking to resurrect a liberal tradition from the 19th century; combining it with modern mechanism designed to displace entrenched power structures. According to Weyl, this enables his preferred school of thought – sometimes referred to as liberal radicalism – to break the left- and right-wing dichotomy he sees as having stagnated change in the world’s most essential systems.

In the place of traditional hierarchies, then, Weyl promotes new, democratic structures – markets that are diverse, inclusive and decentralized.

Some of his ideas go even further. In an email to ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, one he republished on Medium, Weyl went so far as to suggest a tax to penalize “using standard white English.” Elsewhere, he’s tweeted about “tax[ing] masculinity to subsidize femininity.” And following his talk at Devcon, he explicitly asked for questions from female or minority groups first.

“Sorry for not being a woman,” said a male audience member who took the microphone.

Within ethereum, however, the enthusiasm for Weyl’s ideas is at times evangelical. Even in communities that espouse the benefits of decentralization, there’s a tendency to elect icons – and Weyl has undoubtedly become one of them.

His work has inspired blockchains, artworks, science fiction, game designs and political agendas. When he spoke to CoinDesk in September, he claimed “billions” of dollars worth of capital has been pumped into exploring the ideas worldwide. He‘s even been asked to design the social rules for a potential Mars colony.

“It’s getting hard to keep track of what is going on,” Weyl said in Prague, “I’m getting like five requests every day.”

Tipping Point

To cope with the growing hype, Weyl and others have spun up a non-profit foundation as a convening point for their ideas.

Named RadicalXChange, the foundation will culminate in a conference in March that seeks to bring together the various thinkers that are broadcasting Weyl’s methods. According to Weyl, the conference is the locus of an entire social movement that’s bent on saving the world from an imminent political crisis.

“If you ask for a single goal that I have, I think that we were on a trajectory where we were headed for 1930s style global conflict and totalitarianism, and I think that RadicalXChange as a movement can stop that,” Weyl said.

History takes bobblehead form at Glen Weyl’s New York office.

But if Weyl is venerated for his focus on macroeconomic issues, he’s a product of conditions in the smaller world of cryptocurrency as well.

In a way, the enthusiasm for Weyl’s ideas can be said to stem from an absence of purpose that had been palpable since ethereum was trading at all-time highs and spawning viral applications at the tail end of 2017.

At the time, single CryptoKitties were trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars – yet the blockchain itself was burdened with the husks of failed or abandoned projects. With ethereum facing new technical and social challenges, the market mania was coupled with a queasy tension.

“The public clearly has very very high expectations of us, and this makes me feel worried and uneasy inside. We need to try harder to make this actually work,” Buterin tweeted in December 2017.

Amidst this atmosphere, the ideas expressed by “Radical Markets” seemed to introduce a renewed faith that positive social change could be achieved with a system like ethereum, whether that took months or years. Armed with this emphasis on a bright and far-off future, Weyl’s ideas lent the project a regenerated sense of direction.

Weyl sees it similarly, although he argues his ideas may have also helped free the project from the belief that money was an indicator of its success.

Ethereum’s nouveau riche are Weyl’s case and point. He gave Blockchains L.L.C., a startup operated by an early ethereum investor Jeffrey Berns that is seeking to build a blockchain utopia in Nevada, as an example of this.

“I don’t think the Blockchains L.L.C. people are badly intentioned, but I do think they don’t really know what they are doing, and if you just drop a lot of resources in a completely arbitrary way, on someone who doesn’t know, it’s just really not a good social experiment,” he said.

Because decentralization is, in Weyl’s words, “the fundamental principle that animates what is going on in the blockchain space,” enthusiasm for his message stems from the framework he provides to protect it.

“There’s all people like Blockchains L.L.C. where there’s all this power that has landed on someone in a completely arbitrary way and people are like, ‘This is bizarre.’ And so they ask, ‘Is that really going to lead to a liberal society? A decentralized society?’” Weyl said, adding:

“I think that that is what people are looking for an answer to. They are looking for an answer to, ‘How do we build institutions that will achieve our values?’”

Power bubbles

Matters of the present, however, aren’t always on Weyl’s mind; he has a tendency to flit between different time periods when talking.

In our conversation, he traveled from 600 BC up to the Age of Enlightenment, and circles consistently back to 1930s, believing that its proto-fascist political climate isn’t dissimilar to our own.

Historical figurines line Weyl’s desk.

Hitler, Weyl said, “had no power.”

“All power is a bubble,” he explained. “All Hitler had was the beliefs of other people about the beliefs of other people about the beliefs of other people.”

Yet power and its mechanisms, Weyl said, are usually hidden from view. Distinct from this, ethereum and other blockchains stand out for their transparency, which shows the verifiable legitimacy of the system in real time.

“It’s like you can feel the legitimacy or illegitimacy, you can almost measure it, of a system. There’s no historical period where that was so palpable,” he said.

According to Weyl, then, ethereum can be seen as having encountered the pitfalls of centralization. The sell-off, through this lens, is an opportunity, a chance to get it right next time, a chance that maybe systems like the Web never had.

With this second chance, Weyl believes the project needs to overcome its attitude to private property. In particular, he believes that because ethereum combines a formal notion of private property – immutable, cryptographic ownership – with informal governance, it risks leading to nefarious consequences.

“The problem is they formalized private property in an incredibly rich way, and yet they didn’t formalize democracy. And private property without democracy is an incredibly dark and scary thing,” Weyl said.

He pointed to Mencius Moldbug, the infamous neoreactionary author, to illustrate the extreme view of what occurs when private property exists without democratic protections in place.

In Moldbug’s vision, democratic structures are replaced by all-powerful corporations, elected by property holders. And Weyl has a word for governance of this type when coupled with ethereum: Skynet, referring to the villainous artificial intelligence from the Terminator film series.

“The existing system formalizes private property and it doesn’t formalize human beings, and if property exists but humans don’t exist, you will get Skynet,” Weyl said, going on to add:

“That is precisely the opposite of what people want. We built this to avoid Skynet. But if you don’t formalize human beings and only formalize property, skynet is the only thing that you come out with.”

Hope for ethereum

Weyl’s ideas address what he has defined as the crisis of the liberal order – the abandonment of democratic liberalism globally in favor of new forms of nationalism, conflict and economic secession. To protect against this, Weyl argues that ethereum – and the ideology of its leading figures – can play a crucial role.

In his words, ethereum enables new forms of “social technology” that can enforce previously unimaginable democratic structures. Coupled with the powerful ideology of its community, Weyl says, ethereum can help society sidestep emergent totalitarianism.

“What is a good application of ethereum? Avoiding nuclear winter,” he posited.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

And with a new problem to address – one that wasn’t purely due to its trading price or immediate technical aims – word about Weyl began to spread.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of ethereum himself, first publicly discussed Weyl’s work in April.

Writing in a blog post, Buterin broke down the scope of “Radical Markets” and cited the “multifaceted and plentiful” crossovers between the book and the ethereum community. Buterin predicted that “blockchains may well be used as a technical backbone” for the ideas.

Later in May, Buterin and Weyl made their first written appearance together, in a blog post titled “Liberation through Radical Decentralization,” written in the style of a manifesto.

With a heavy emphasis on quadratic voting, the post urged that combining ideas from the “Radical Markets” canon with blockchain tech could help challenge oppressive power and generate a “free, open and cooperative world in the 21st century.”

Effectively, quadratic voting is Weyl’s answer to ethereum’s informal governance system. What it does is re-engineer the “one person one vote” democracy envisioned by bitcoin so that minorities have a higher say, achieved through using a clever math technique called quadratic scaling.

Collaborations between the two have since culminated in a research paper authored alongside Ph.D. of economics Zoë Hitzig, titled “Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral among Communities,” which provides a distilled description of the quadratic voting mechanism.

Titled “Liberal Radicalism” (LR) after the duo’s emerging social philosophy of the same name, the paper expanded the notion of quadratic voting outward, such that it could apply to funding.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Buterin said that what Weyl had achieved was a reactivation of some of the more politically aligned blockchain applications that were being touted back in 2014 – ideas such as universal basic income based on the blockchain.

As Buterin put it:

“[Weyl] came along and offered some really interesting and novel ideas backed up by solid mathematical reasoning that could actually be a substantial improvement on the status quo.”

“So, naturally there’s a lot of interest,” he added.

Science fiction

Indeed, it was a common theme in interviews conducted by CoinDesk, with “Radical Markets” supporters regularly citing Weyl’s work as the best hope in a world they see as faced with growing inequality and atomization.

For example, Mark Housley from the quadratic voting-powered political signaling platform WeAreThePeople told CoinDesk that “no one has come up with a better way,” to address widening income gaps and the rise of populism and democratic participation more broadly.

Still, beyond a tight clique of starry-eyed enthusiasts, there’s evidence that for some, Weyl’s ideas remain too high-risk, and perhaps too esoteric, for implementation in the immediate future.

To discover why, it helps to look to Buterin’s April blog post, which for a large part was structured as a critique.

“I love this vision. So, let me be a good intellectual citizen and do my best to try to make a case against it,” Buterin wrote at the time.

Buterin argued that some of Weyl’s ideas, perhaps, demanded too high a complexity to become livable market structures. He cited the “mental transaction costs” involved with moving people to such models, maintaining that while well-engineered, the complexity of the ideas may render them less feasible to implement.

Giving an example from inside the blockchain space, Buterin warned that some of the Weyl’s economic models might not be able to sustain the hostile, scam-fueled landscape of the cryptocurrency industry. Beyond these critiques voiced by Buterin, there have been other, more philosophically rooted reactions to Weyl’s thought as well – in particular, his belief that economics can cure all social ills.

And that’s because, in Weyl’s view, the rise of movements like right-wing populism is fundamentally an economic question – rooted in wealth inequality – and not, as others might argue, a result of more slippery, irrational inclinations, such as romanticism.

Confronted with this observation, Weyl defended his position, stating that at its heart, economics is no different to disciplines such as sociology, philosophy or politics.

A bookshelf in Weyl’s Microsoft office.

“We all worship the same god,” he said. “They are just ways of allocating resources.”

Still, Weyl differentiates this view from the mainstream economics community, which is rife with he calls “weenie supremacy” – in his words, “the view that any form of intelligence that is not perfectly correlated with a SAT score contains no value.”

To correct the ills of his community, then, Weyl incorporates the views of other disciplines, regularly working alongside philosophers, artists and post-colonial theorists that complement – and at times contradict – his economics-centric worldview.

Artists and writers are heralded by Weyl as a way to provide critical feedback prior to implementation. For example, blockchain researcher Primavera De Filippi‏ is amassing a sci-fi anthology of Radical Markets ideas intended to speculate on the outcome of the models if applied.

“It’s harder to do it in the real world right now, so instead of trying something in practice and then having to wait and see what happens, science fiction gives you the opportunity to discuss the different ways that it could be implemented,” she told CoinDesk.

Another project that critically extrapolates on Weyl’s ideas is “Radical Bodies,” a concept conceived by ethereum developers Lane Rettig and Dean Eigenmann at a hackathon in Prague, in which rolling auctions are applied to advertising space on people’s clothing.

Based on an idea from “Radical Markets,” the advertising space – such as t-shirts – would be under permanent auction. At any stage, an owner can be outbid by someone else – an action which would force a sale.

Rettig described the idea as a political statement, telling CoinDesk that “Radical Bodies” exposes the market dynamics that are already active within much of the data-driven economy.

“We’re selling ourselves to Google, Facebook and the others all the time, so why not be explicit about it and receive some compensation?” he said.

Still, the idea provoked some criticism at Devcon4. Weyl himself described the idea as “dystopic.” One attendee, who wished to remain anonymous, speculated on what would happen if the same market logic was applied, not to clothing, but to body parts.

Implying that there were areas of life in which such markets structures can be dangerous, the attendee asked: “How much do you value your eyes? And what would happen if I value them more than you?”

Changing the world

Still, in spite of philosophical differences, Weyl claims his ideas are attracting serious dialogue among governments and politics internationally.

For example, he’s optimistic some of his ideas will be tested in Europe during the next couple of years. Within this, Weyl says ethereum – and blockchain more broadly – have the opportunity to gain a level of legitimacy that the technology has yet to achieve.

“This could a way of explaining to the broader community and forming links with artists and real politicians and policy makers and so forth,” he said in the interview.

But there are other ways that the two disciplines can enforce each other as well. Blockchain, for example, is frequently being touted as a way to test Weyl’s ideas in small environments that won’t cause any damage if the experiments don’t go according to plan.

And that’s notable because, perhaps predictably, ideas like rolling auctions as an alternative to private property have been met with some backlash, with many arguing that the model fails to offer the stability required by some members of society, such as families.

And there are other ideas that have been met with suspicion as well.

For example, each idea proposed by Weyl requires digital identity, possibly one of the most coveted and contested ideas within the cryptocurrency industry due to the potentially totalitarian consequences that such information could have if concentrated.

“It is absolutely dangerous to try to build political and technical systems which demand a single identity,” Harry Halpin, the scientific advisor to Panoramix, warned.

Still, Weyl is aware of the problems of building identity solutions and is taking steps to address the idea hands-on. Today he’s in the process of designing a solution that he thinks can sidestep some of these concerns. Within it, Weyl swaps out the idea of a self-sovereign identity for a new kinds of community-based identity systems.

“We are fundamentally social beings,” Weyl remarked.

According to Weyl, a distributed identity system with a strong concept of collectivity could minimize the risks inherent to the technology. The specifics of this solution are still being teased out, and are expected to be published in a white paper alongside Stanford professor Matt Jackson and Microsoft researcher Nicole Immorlica in the coming months.

Arguably, the heavy reliance on identity that is demonstrated by “Radical Markets” is emblematic of Weyl’s unique coupling of humans with market structures.

And while the combination is distasteful for some, it’s worth noting that it is precisely this blend, and its ability to link tech to social justice, that appeals to the ethereum community.

“We’re building what we’re building in order to make the world a better place, to right a lot of the wrongs we perceive, but most of us are engineers, not economists or social scientists, so sometimes it can be hard to understand how tech can actually change the world,” ethereum developer Lane Rettig told CoinDesk.

Rettig concluded:

“‘Radical Markets’ presents one vision for how ethereum can change the world, and for why our work matters – it can be the connective tissue between the tech and society.”

––––––––––––––––––––––––

Art by Chibi Fighters (@chibifighters)

Photos by Pete Rizzo for CoinDesk

Source

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[mikemortgage]

Peter Foster: Trans Mountain will prove Ottawa can’t run an oil company — again

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are about to undertake their first significant piece of energy nationalization in three decades, and it’s going to be ugly. Their imminent $4.5-billion takeover of the Trans Mountain pipeline and its $7-billion-plus expansion proposal, has its nearest historical counterpart in the acquisitions made by Pierre Trudeau’s state oil company, Petro-Canada, in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the attitude of the second Trudeau regime to nationalization could not be more different from the first. The good news is that the acquisition of Trans Mountain is attached to no grand xenophobic industrial strategies (in fact it goes in the opposite direction, to Ottawa’s commitment to a low-carbon “transition.”) The bad news is that it is an act of sheer desperation by a government that finds itself up a climate-policy creek in a barbed-wire canoe.

In fact, the lessons of Petrocan appear entirely forgotten, if indeed they were ever widely known. Petrocan was taken over by Suncor almost 10 years ago and is now known by most people merely as a gas station brand that sponsors sports on the CBC. Suncor runs Petro-Canada now as a respectable business, but given its history, it is remarkable that the brand exists at all. Anybody who kept “Titanic,” “Edsel” or “Enron” as a brand name might be thought deranged, but it’s in the same category that Petrocan belongs.

The state oil company’s very expensive lesson was that government can’t run things (it never made a cent of profit), can’t compete with the private sector (it was comprehensively outmaneuvered when it tried to take over Husky), can’t resist using such instruments for political reasons (It grossly overpaid for Petrofina to “show the flag” in Quebec), and is inevitably bamboozled by its own creations (chairman and CEO Bill Hopper kept the board in the dark, but was brilliant at persuading Ottawa to fund the expansion of his empire). It did however run a very successful Olympic torch relay to Calgary in 1988.

Then again, do we need any more lessons in government incompetence? The federal Liberals’ announcement in May that they would buy Trans Mountain coincided with an auditor general’s report that Canada has a “broken government system.” Among the many other things it can’t do is build bridges (Champlain), or organize payroll systems (Phoenix).

Bizarrely, however, the fact that the government can’t run anything in particular has transmogrified — thanks to the manufactured climate crisis — into a claim that it must “sustainably” regulate everything in general. This megalomanic aspiration is just one part of a program of global governance co-ordinated by the utterly corrupted and incompetent United Nations. Predictably, that system is crashing the world over, and not just because of President Donald Trump’s denialist deplorables.

When Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the Trans Mountain deal a couple of months ago, he couldn’t stress too strongly how the government had no intention of being in the pipeline business long term. Part of the deal was that the project’s parent, Kinder Morgan, would help the government look for another private investor to whom to pass the parcel. The period for Kinder’s assistance ran out last weekend, just after the cabinet reshuffle that saw Edmonton MP Amarjeet Sohi take over the Natural Resources portfolio, and with it responsibility for Trans Mountain. Sohi politely declared that he had “big shoes to fill,” but the more important feature of the ministerial footwear previously worn by Jim Carr, his predecessor, is that they are nailed to the floor.

As the former minister for infrastructure, Sohi knows something about handing out government money, but Trans Mountain is not a problem that can be solved by throwing taxpayers’ cash at it, although that was inevitably the government’s first resort (Albertans should be doubly appalled that Rachel Notley is also willing to kick in up to $2 billion).

Meanwhile, the Liberals’ infrastructure plans have been treading water. Ironically, in their desire to shovel money out the door, the Liberals abandoned a provision that says projects should be checked out for their potential as public-private partnerships; governments were considered far more efficient at spending money. The Liberals would love a P3 now.

Ottawa has been peddling the notion that lots of companies have been looking at Trans Mountain, and that it may have snapped up “a bargain,” but despite the offer of government indemnities against political risk, nobody has stepped in. Any investor who would do so would be rash indeed, for the more funds the government had to pay out to cover all costs caused by court delays and civil disobedience, the more the investor would be pilloried as an incompetent corporate-welfare bum. Certainly all sorts of investors would be interested in buying the system once — or rather if — the expansion were completed.

It is difficult to imagine how Trans Mountain will not remain an albatross until the next election, although the Liberals obviously made the political calculation that buying it was better than simply having the project die immediately due to their startlingly muddled policies on energy and the environment.

It is hardly good news for the Liberals that Trans Mountain is likely to be overshadowed by the even larger — but very much related — fight over carbon taxes, as current and imminent provincial premiers, reflecting the belated awakening of their electorates, fight these economically destructive and environmentally pointless burdens.

Under government ownership, pressure is bound to increase for Indigenous interests to be given an equity interest. That, in fact, may be inevitable. But there are also other pressing issues, such as how many women there will be on the Trans Mountain board, and whether the company’s procurement is suitably supportive of racial, gender and every other diversity.

While it should be of concern that the “learnings” of Petrocan have never been absorbed, Trans Mountain is about to provide a whole new set of lessons about the contradictions of pretentious green progressivism.

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2LJq02u via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[conversationswithmyrabbit]

Sweet Home Montonui?

The key theme within Moana is identity. Many of the characters exhibit crises of identity. Antihero Maui is a self-proclaimed narcissist who constantly evaluates himself by his power and his accomplishments; the tattoos on his skin represent his victories and even they begin to turn on him. When he loses his hook, the source of his shapeshifting power, he states forlornly ‘I’m not Maui without my hook’. Sharing a similar superciality is (sort-of) villain Tamatoa who is obsessed with his appearance and tries to make himself look as glamorous and ‘shiny’ (as he constantly refers to in the Bowie-esque song) as possible. This is partly a predatory habit to lure fish who are attracted by ‘the brightest thing that glitters’, but he is also susceptible to flattery which is telling that his appearance is as much self-induced, as adaptive. Furthermore, Te Fiti (a sort of ‘mother nature’) defines herself by her mistakes and needs Moana’s reassurance in the climactic scene that ‘this does not define you’. Even the retarded chicken gets to demonstrate plot development. However, the dominant character arc is Moana’s journey to find out who she is as she agonisingly fluctuates between her father’s wishes of remaining on the island to be his successor and to explore the sea. There is fertile ground to analyse this theme, but most interesting is the relationship between the abstract island and the characters (kind of like in Lost where the island becomes a character of its own). This allows a comprehensive study of how space and place affect identity in Moana. The notion that is forwarded at the premise of the film is that space and place are strongly related to identity, or essentially that the place you are from and live strongly affects who you are as a person. This is the idea that is presented by Moana’s father and chief of the island who describes Montonui as an idyllic utopia which is the source and the reason for the inhabitants’ contentment. The island provides a plethora of natural resources that when paired with the organised and autarkical community provide everything that the people need. The villagers sing; ‘We use each part of the coconut, that’s all we need. We make the nets from the fibres, the water is sweet inside, we use the leaves to build fires and cook up the meat inside’. Moana’s father says; ‘Montonui is paradise… who would want to go anywhere else?’ and then adds, ‘it is where you’re meant to be’. This addition demonstrates his character motivation – he pressures Moana to abandon her dream of travelling to be his successor on the island. Her mother, though more sympathetic than the chief, is just as despondent about the idea of finding one’s identity beyond the realms of duty and responsibility as the Montonui community have shaped theirs for generations. She tells Moana that ‘who we wish we were, what we wish we could do, is just not meant to be’. The connection between space, place and identity is firmly implanted in Moana and the audience. There is an intrinsic link between ‘where you are’ and ‘who you are’. Moana is instructed she must find happiness ‘right where [she is]’ and that the stability of her identity is dependent on where she is. Despite Moana’s objections and mild rebellion against her father, she is taken to a pile of horizontal rocks on the peak of the island and asked by her father to place one of her own above it as a symbol of her leadership and the progeny of the island’s community. This is an monumental symbol. Whilst for the chief, it represents the buttressing of Montonui and being physically as well as symbolically ‘bigger’ than before, for Western audiences, the pattern of rocks relates to the semiotics of sacrifice. The rocks are a sacrificial landmark and she is being asked to sacrifice herself, her desires and her identity for the sake of her people. For these audiences, what her father is asking is not an honour, it is a burden that should be resisted. Moana abandons the mantra that identity is linked to place and embarks on her adventure beyond the reef she has been confined by. This is partly motivated by the fact that an external force has begun to corrupt the natural resources on her island. She leaves the island on the promise that she will find a solution, but we must also remember that she has been wanting to leave the entire film (like seriously, most shots of her on the island involve her solemnly staring out into the sea). Feminist readers would regard her ship sailing away from the island as a symbol of her liberation from her father’s hegemony, Marxists may view it as an expression of her rejection of society’s ideological weights, but ultimately this is Moana dissecting the closely knit bond between space and identity. She is no longer going to be defined by where she is, or by the role that is provided for her there. In its place, she forwards a new formula for the formation of identity; one that is based around internal ‘spirit’ and choices and experiences. There are numerous times in the film where she counsels characters on their identity crises. She reassures Maoi that ‘Gods don’t make you Maoi. You are Maoi’. This is a concept of identity that resonates with audiences in individualistic cultures –societies that are deeply connected to the global market and rarely regard their life as having a firm existence in one place. However, the predilection for the approach of identity in Moana by Western audiences shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, to view identity and place as separate ideas is a Western idea in itself. This is where things become troubling, because although there is nothing wrong with this Western portrayal of identity, Moana is set against a non-Western backdrop. Firstly, the Maori culture, like many others outside of the West, is communalistic rather than individualistic – they are based around the many, not the few – therefore, we could ask the question of whether a non-Western projection of Moana would really have left the island? Would she have placed her rock above her fathers and continued the legacy of the island because that would be the right thing to do for her people, rather than for her self? Some may argue that the accusation that Moana is in anyway ‘individualistic’ is moot anyway because her motivation for leaving is to fix the problem that her island faces (i.e. the deceased coconuts and the empty fishing lanes). However, her desire to leave pre-existed the problems on the island. Although they may have catalysed her decision, she was motivated by a ‘call inside’. In her big song, she uses daring imagery and a semantic field of adventure and exploration. These depict her personal ambition rather than her benevolence for the island. The projection of individualistic values onto a communalistic tribe is troubling, but when observed alongside the political treatment of these tribes, the film’s theme becomes dangerous. Again, this all comes down to Moana’s decision to leave and where she values her identity in regards to space and place. Right-wing commentators would establish the villain of the film to be Te Ka (evil lava demon thing) who represents the negative and destructive aspects of nature. They would laud the inhabitants of Montonui for not realising the threat of Malthusian traps on their small island and for not spreading or colonising the surrounding islands for safety and stability. Those comments might be fair in the context of the narrative of Moana, where the threat to Montonui was natural. But the most identifiable and the most devastating threat to tribes like the Maori but also other minority groups from a historical perspective have not been natural, but rather imperial. Colonists were the ones who forces aboriginal tribes from their homelands – or perhaps, more identifiable to American audiences, it was colonists who forced the native Americans onto reservations, where they remain today. Whilst it might be too much of a stretch to argue that Te Ka represents white colonialism, it is clearly a strong political dialogue in society today; a call that has still been unanswered, and whilst it may be refreshing for Western audiences to see Moana disassemble the link between cultural identity and a fixed place, it is dangerous also. It represents an idea that was used by colonists to exploit territorial gain and one that was used to justify and legitimise the unfair transposition of natives in America from their homelands to reservations. The idea was that natives culture was internal, it belonged to them and would not change if they were moved from their lands. There was no intrinsic connection for the colonists between a certain place and these peoples’ identities. They were as culturally nomadic as they were physically. But this is a Western idea and these people did certainly have a strong connection to their places of origin, which some have held for generations. For these people, there was a fixed link between identity and place. When Moana broke this idea, and importantly when Moana broke this idea as a member of the Maori tribe, she sent a message to all audiences, but particularly white Western audiences, that ethnic groups do not require their homelands to form a strong cultural identity. If this message is believed, internalised and transcribed into decree it could represent real danger for these peoples. Moana was great. It was entertaining and it was approached so creatively that making only one blog was incredibly hard (expect more), but it is important to remember that it was a Western export.