• The hypocrisy of this astounds me.
  Technorati tags: Catholicism, Homosexuality, Clergy.

Tagged: Manchester, Stockport, Snow.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) is a much maligned and greatly misunderstood composer. Speaking from historical experience, then, it can be surmised that his work will hold a significance far beyond that which we appreciate today. After our school May Ball four years ago (at which I passed out (in Loughborough Town Hall Square), nearly threw up out of my friend's car window, and nearly died from a nut allergy) I went to sleep in my completely battered state with my earphones injecting Messiaen's complete Livre d'orgue into my mind (on repeat). I had some of the strangest dreams.

I wrote a paper last year (for which I got 80, my best mark ever!) on the proto-postmodernist intent in Messiaen's work, in an attempt to illustrate 1) how the arts almost universally anticipate the developments in philosophy (and theology, since they are two sides of the same coin) by a few decades; and 2) how there inheres in postmodernity a great deal that is analogous to premodernity. (This, I feel, is why we find it appropriate and easy to read Augustine today, over and above, say, Thomas Aquinas.)

Technorati tags: Messiaen, Postmodernism, Theology, Philosophy.

A bottle of FAIRTRADE Chilean Merlot appealed far more than: Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq or anything else worthwhile. Now I'm going to pass out in bed.

Random horizon line
Broken by trees

And foreground of
Bent grass in breeze

House to the right
And post to the left

Montage dynamic raindrops
Rattling death

And air

More air

Technorati tags: Poetry, Art, Wilshere.
Read the small print. ©2005.

Labels: poetry

• Guardian interview with Jamie Bell.
  Technorati tags: Jamie Bell, Guardian, King Kong.

• Insights of Mark Vernon on friendship in the twenty-first century. Quite an interesting take on the (seven) different ways in which people structure their relationship with friends, family and colleagues.
  Technorati tags: Vernon, Friendship, Guardian.
• Martyn Percy interprets Remembrance Day.
  Technorati tags: Martyn, Percy, Remembrance.

I'm finding it hard to go to bed. It means complete resignation to the fact that I'll have to wake up and live another day.

• Manchester University is officially Institution of the Year 2005 (according to the Times Higher).
  Technorati tags: Manchester, University, Awards.
• Man, 50, pulls truck with penis. via Obscure Store.
  Technorati tags: Qigong, Penis.

"When I am standing in front of a grand orchestra and have drunk a half-bottle of champagne, then I conduct like a young God. Otherwise I am nervous and tremble, feel unsure of myself, and then everything is lost. The same is true of my visits to the bank manager." —Jean Sibelius

Yes, the Hallé have such clarity in their playing, great unanimity, absolute sharpness in their projection of the music; but there is no changing the fact that the audience are all sixty-plus (apart from the attractive teenage boy whom I will not mention; I am convinced, following my extensive survey, that he was the only person there younger than me). Pekka Kuusisto is a true virtuoso violinist and has everything that a virtuoso needs: talent, commitment, and a great degree of arrogance; it is easy to feel as if nothing in the presence of such a performer. But there is a negation which inheres in such individual performance; conversation with the orchestra becomes arbitrary (summed up in the encore he gave. An encore? After a concerto? It felt to me like having a three course meal with coffee and chocolates in front of the fire, and then opening a bag of prawn crackers), and the virtuoso is alone. We allow this, you know; think about it; a "great artist" is excused all kind of faults; no, further: the faults of a great artist are positively celebrated! "Hooray! Peter Sellers was a misanthropist! And Nietzsche was mentally ill! And Caravaggio was a paedophile!" How so?

So, yes, I can go to the Bridgewater Hall and hear the near-faultless production, but I leave as if having consumed nothing, knowing how completely self-absorbed and contingent the whole professional music scene is. What is the point? In fact, during Walton's Symphony Number One, it occurred to me that music really is the most profound nonsense. I mean, yes, it is structured, and there is much to make sense of in that structure, but it is, at its most basic, completely nonsense, a random association of sounds, just as language is. We understand this nonsense because we share some ideas about the BASE reference points to which music adheres. When we hear an orchestra play music (which must be a communal affair; there is always an audience), we are saying to our neighbour: Yes, I understand your language, and you understand mine.

Technorati tags: Hallé, Manchester, Linguistics, Walton, Sibelius, Bridgewater.

At first I thought it was snow, but Oxford Road is just covered in a layer of dust because of the Maths Tower's demolition.

Technorati tags: Manchester, Oxford, Road.

• Bush is drinking again.
  Technorati tags: Bush, America, Alcohol.
• Caliban on the hypocrisy of U.S. attitudes towards al-Jazeera (allegedly).
  Technorati tags: al-Jazeera, CIA, Press.

The Star of Redemption

1. It is unclear what R.'s first principle is philosophically. It may be that the convergence of theology and philosophy has done away with the need for such a formal/idealistic concern, but what is R.'s true starting point? Perhaps R. is anticipating postmodern scepticism towards the metanarrative that a concrete first principle implies, but at other times his focus on biblical texts and their interpretation hints at an absolutism which is anathema to postmodernity. Is R. making a similar mistake Descartes in this respect? Rather, R. wants a God and world that are "created anew every day", but can imagine only one History. He is placed in a tradition; this he acknowledges; but is it for him the only tradition, the one true tradition/history by which others must be judged? This is what I mean by: what is R.'s true starting point?

2. Swipes at Islam render reading R. difficult in today's world. Does R. need the alterity of Islam to give his own philosophy weight? He also represents an idealised model of the Judeo-Christian God, and fails to account for the criticisms of Marx and Freud (for example) who are keen to point out human subservience/submission towards the Judeo-Christian God. Addressing God "Father" in Christian language, for example, raises questions about the sociological verity of the egality of the I-You cosmic relationship. This alterity of Islam would also seem, to a certain extent, to violate the love of neighbour passage formulated in II/3.

3. There is ambiguity about the place of the body and of bodily existence in the context of revelation. R. stresses the importance of speech and of conversation in revelaing love through the I-You relation. But he fails to deal adequately with sexual love, the accidence of "body". This is a shortcoming because in many ways R.'s task has been to deny a body/soul dichotomy in favour of discussing the "wholeness" of man. Does this belie a deeper-seated Judeo-Christian ambivalence towards the body, which verges on the ascetic renunciation of the mystic (II/3)?

4. R.'s grammatical analysis and linguistic philosophy seems partial read today. The linguistic turn in R.'s work (II/1) has clear links with post-Saussureian linguistic thought, particularly Derrida (speech thinking/speech act theory). But R.'s ideas about "root words" etc. can seem arbitrary and schematic. While aspects do compute, such as the importance of the first person narrative, other aspects are contingent, such as the discussion of "this/that/here/there" (II/1 pp128-129) and assume a universality ("most languages") which is vague and does not account enough for language difference and language change.

5. For such an abstract, universalising work, R. can seem orthodox and exclusive. For instance, he denies that anyone can truly love his neighbour unless he "has been awakened to God's love" (I paraphrase). Does that mean an atheist cannot truly love? This abstraction leaves R.'s philosophy lacking in the details of practice, of the real-world implications of corporeality (cf point 3).

Technorati tags: Rosenzweig, Philosophy, Judaism.

I felt a bout of depression coming on, so checked to see if our dear friend the Express could provide me with a justification. And, surprise! It could:

Express logic: Unions=Bad. Privatisation=Bad. Government=Bad. Express=World's Greatest Newspaper.

Technorati tags: Newspaper, Express, Pensions, Britain.

• Excellent Sigur Rós video on Google Video. Also, here's the Sigur Rós website. via Up for Redemption?
  Technorati tags: Video, Sigur, Ros.

From the Journal. 10.x.05.

These are my speciality. My life is a balancing act, covering up the different lies, misinformation, and disinformation that I have accorded different friends and relatives. One day, surely, it will all collapse in on me. But it's not all bad; I don't lie that often. In fact, for a compulsive liar, I'm remarkably honest. The problem is that the lies and deceptions I weave myself into are big ones, indeed, they are the biggest. I seem to have the ability to turn great situations into complete arse-over-tits balls-ups, an inverse Midas touch, where everything I touch turns from gold into shit. How so? All the things I work for, achieve, all the places I visit, all the houses I live in, become tainted within weeks, if not days, by my mistakes, sins, and lies. The walls of this house are already associated most of all with guilt. This is my life, and like it or not, this is the way my life has always been.

I will end up alone, even if it is in a crowd of people; sometimes I want nothing more than that anonymity, that non-indentity. The city sums it up; I can be a nobody, people pass each other in the street in the city, quite literally as if they did not exist. How strange that must seem to some people. In the city, no-one thinks anything of it if you are a nobody. The city is a city of nobodies, nonidentities either through personality crisis, which seals the individual off from other individuals and robs him of his identity (since his identity is, inherently, a corporate affair; there is no identity if there is no-one else to identify), or through mass culture, which swallows up identity and supplants it with the thinly-veiled myth of individualism which is uniform, mechanised consumption. Is there any but these two groups? If I am not to be mechanised consumer, am I to become a nonidentity?

Technorati tags: Lies, City, Consumerism, Individualism.

• Similarity between new UK anti-terror legislation and Apartheid in South Africa.
  Technorati tags: Apartheid, Terrorism, Britain.
• Blogging and politics: mass depoliticisation or mass politicisation?
  Technorati tags: Politics, Depoliticisation, Blogging.
• Amusing "Danger: Deconstruction in progress" sign.
  Technorati tags: Deconstruction, Construction, Derrida.
• Informative essay about democracy and cyberspace over on OpenDemocracy. Includes discussion of relationship between real & virtual, which we could do with expanding on.
  Technorati tags: Internet, Governance, Democracy.

Three of us went to London this weekend to hear "The Voice of Mexico" Eugenia Leon at Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. Completely in Spanish, so we couldn't really understand a word of the lyrics — but the music was still worth it. More rewarding, though, was meeting up with two old friends from Leicester, one of whom was head chorister while I was deputy at St James. There's something very surreal about meeting up with friends from a part of your life which now feels completely alien; the last time we were all together was probably when we were 12; especially so when the meeting is in a crowded Starbucks in Leicester Square drinking Gingerbread Lattés, trying not to get chucked out for hogging the table in spite of finishing our drinks two hours previously... So we're back again, in real life, the present, and I'm longing for a time that never was.

Technorati tags: London, Jazz, Mexico.

• Horkheimer & Adorno's landmark text.

Death?

So ten years on, that living corpse,
Found sprawled upon the bathroom floor,
Is agony made real once more.
The body's dead, but wounds the living;
A mortal act, that needs forgiving.

We have the upper hand on death;
We have the words and breath to speak,
But deathless Love is mute, and meek;
It seeks to turn its death to rage
And voices Anger in a cage.

We look beyond, each one of us,
And dream of our own dying day;
We wish our waking life away,
So desperate, as we are, to see
That Nothing of Eternity.

Are you out there, Father, dead?
Your End's a tale we all narrate,
A fiction issuing rage, not hate.
This grief a universal one:
Son to Father; Father to Son.

[31.v.05] Read the small print. ©2005.

Labels: poetry

So I'm supposed to be typing up my family history, just as I'm supposed to be doing a whole host of other things. My father spent his life writing about other lives. I continue to judge myself by others' standards and to live my life in the shadow of GENEALOGY and expectation. Genealogy. What to make of this obsession? What would Derrida make of it? J. said tonight, "We were all farm labourers", meaning, "Our ancestors were all farm labourers", but this is an interesting metonymy. "We" to mean "our ancestors". It sums up the eschatology of genealogy, and those obsessed with tracing their family trees. They do not do it for history's sake, or for their "own interest" (we think, paradoxically, of "interests" as being decidedly disinterested), but rather to construct themselves, to deny death, to project their own immortality by convincing themselves of the resuscitability of their forbears. Of course, no such resuscitation is possible, and I now recognise no such resuscitation is valuable, since it only displaces identity in the end. I want to be myself, not the inevitable end-product of an unfinishing line. True, perhaps we lack a genealogy in Western postmodern society, that is, we lack a genealogy in the broadest sense, we lack roots, but this rootlessness is itself valuable and opens up new possibilities. Or perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps we are beyond rootlessness. Perhaps the Enlightenment convinced us of our absolute rootlessness, and now in postmodernity we realise that as much as we would like to deny the past, it is still there. Yes, that sounds more like it.

Technorati tags: Genealogy, Postmodernism, Derrida.

• Guardian report on the Openshaw Eden cell. via Sanctus1

• Daily Mail Quote of the Day: Should Jamie [Oliver] have slit a lamb's throat on T.V.? For. Fuck's. Sake. Reading the responses to this question on the Mail's website makes me feel far sicker than watching an animal being killed. How do these people's minds work? Oppose the meat market altogether if this appalls you so much; otherwise get over the fact that this, and far worse methods is how you chattering classes get your fucking food. My favourite comments comes from the decidedly working-class sounding Charlotte Scadeng of Oxford, whose "final nail in Jamie's coffin" is that "my Jamie Oliver cook book is going in the dustbin tonight." You go, Charlotte.

I recently read an old post from Ben Hammersley entitled The Hegelian Dialectic of Syndication Formats, going on to explain his frustration with people explaining the transition from RSS 2.0-RSS 1.0-Atom 1.0 as analogue of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. That's a fair frustration to have. But why do people swallow the summary of Hegel as "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" in the first place? It is, after all, a profound misrepresentation. Dialectics are not such tidy affairs for Hegel. Western academic disciplines have adopted the A-B-AB structure as dubbed it "philosophical", but nothing could be further from the truth in my view. Hegel's achievement, and the reason that he is the founding father of post-Enlightenment philosophy, is to have re-introduced the dimension of time into philosophy. In the classical age time was considered illusory, and the pursuit of a universal, united, timeless philosophy was paramount. Hegel established that time matters. So what does this mean for his Dialectics?

Two points: 1] As I have already suggested, Hegel's Dialectics were never as simple as we would now like to believe. (If I was going to pursue this, I would say that the A-B-AB bastardisation is effected to delineate the limits and structure of academic work; it is a standard de rigueur which reinforces, in its own way, the social structure.) If we were to return ad fontes, we would see that anything can assume the position of "thesis", "antithesis", or "synthesis", that none of these concepts are internally united, and that they will continue to disintegrate and reintegrate in varying forms. There is implied in the popular account of the Hegelian Dialectic a feeling of direction which is not there. Dialectics do not equal development.

2] This is all futile in any event, because, as important as Hegel is, he is outdated. I happen to have picked up the Ben Hammersley post at a point when I am reading Derrida. The Hegelian categories, misrepresented though they be, become so unstable in the light of Derrida that we cannot continue with them. For that reason, I believe the academic world needs to abandon its blind adherence to this fictionalised dialectical structure. (And this is, gradually, happening.)

• Ha! Washington Post has amusing article turning Le Monde's sword against itself. Racism towards New Orleans? Undoubtedly... but take a look at your own back yard first. via Beebo.org

Labels: racism

Little of worth to comment on, you might think. Well, you'd be right. But you're here anyway, so I'll tell you about my evening. I drank a bottle of £8.00 French wine (which I pretend wasn't reduced to £3.99), had a mildly soggy dose of fish and chips, and watched about five hours of T.V. It's the solution, baby.

Pierre Boulez was the subject of that awkward slot between Channel 4 news and whatever-starts-at-8.30, since watching two episodes of Friends would be intellectually unacceptable. I've heard his name on Radio 3 for years, but never really thought to take much interest. Anyway, the programme about him on BBC Four was interesting. It's always a privilege to get to see footage of great conductors rehearsing. At 10.00 Peep Show made a long-awaited comeback on Channel 4. I love it. Mitchell and Webb are a genius pair, and, like all good comedy, we laugh because we see ourselves; more accurately, we laugh, because we are nervous that other people will realise that their secrets are our secrets too.

• Silvio Berlusconi is currently leading this month's OpenDemocracy "Bad Democracy" poll. Hurrah! (Although it's a shame that T.B. didn't make it on to the short list.)
• More on the hilarious naivety of U.S. Christian krazees.
• Obscure Store has the story of a McDonald's drone breaking the record for number of Drive-Thru customers served in an hour: 349. 349?! That's one every ten seconds!

Breaking news: The Daily Express is Britain's greatest upholder of truth!

Lamentations

The city sits solitary,
And is full of people.
Our ultimate society,
This limitless community,
Is trampled in the street,
Like a beer can under feet.

How is she become a widow,
How is her empire dead?
It's illegal immigration
That has been her denigration,
And the rivers of White Stripe,
And the shadows in the night!

The city is a wilderness
And one day will be rubble.
Even Rome and Athens,
In their day, became but ruins.
Our city, too, will perish.
Our dreams will all be finished.

Labels: poetry

• Tackling totalitarianism together?
• This blog documents, primarily photographically, the personal stories of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Recommended...
• And this post, from the same site, shows what a positive relational tool the Internet can, and should, be.

Interesting Catholic outburst against Christian fundamentalist/creationists.

The single most productive day in British politics for at least two years.

So I'm slowly trying to come to terms with Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, which I first wrote about a few weeks ago. The problem for me is that so much of my recent study has been in strands of postmodern philosophy that my reading of Rosenzweig is almost terminally coloured by post-Saussurean linguistic-philosophical figures such as Derrida. Nevertheless, I think we can detect a postmodern turn in Rosenzweig's writing. His idea of "speech thinking" — of favouring conversation over writing as a means of thinking — is a profoundly [proto-]postmodern one. Ideas of truth as communal, or under negotiation through intrapersonal verbal exchange, are certainly not characteristic of the broadly Existentialist school with which Rosenzweig can most plausibly be associated, albeit via a heavy Judeo-Christian metaphysics.

But this postmodern turn in R.'s work is in constant tension with some pretty absolutist ideas. His constant snipes at Islam are a real problem, and they betray something of an incompleteness in R.'s thinking. If he really believed that Truth was negotiable through conversation, he wouldn't be so quick to judge the merits of some [fictional, as I see it] unified vision of Islam. Furthermore, I can't help reading R.'s categories of creation-revelation-redemption (which are complex and I'll try to return to in a future post) in a profoundly socio-linguistic and even psychoanalytical way — that is, that it is only through language and the creation of these abstract, metaphorical, categories, that we come to any understanding of God-world-man in the first place. Rather, R. views language as a reflection of creation-revelation-redemption (words are always being created-adapted-reclaimed with a "proper" meaning). In fact, we see that R.'s ideas about speech-thinking are really rather rigid.

So, how do we read Rosenzweig in the light of Derrida? This is the question I am now seeking to address. R. seems to be asking us to do deconstruction ahead of time — but how will R.'s own work really stand up to deconstruction? Would R. want it to stand up to it?

Information Politics on the Web by Richard Rogers wins stuff. Looks like an interesting project.

France only gets worse. Most disturbing is the profound political indifference to such clearly entrenched divisions. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité? I think not. Vive la revolution!

Caliban posting on the disgraceful anti-terror legislation passed here in the UK by just one vote last week.

Should. Have. Invested. Student. Loan.

France shit domestically, France shit internationally...

Birmingham, Paris, New Orleans; whatever happened to the Enlightenment project? The flip side of postmodernity is that we seem to have completely lost faith in all narratives, epistemologies, and knowledges. I am afraid that healthy scepticism towards modernist narratives is being exceeded and ending in a return to the old myths of racial difference. These ideas are gaining more currency, and government policies in the West aren't helping. The age of diplomacy dies with the advent of globalisation. Can we not return to the Enlightment project older, wiser, and with a better sense of its potential pitfalls? The enemy within is the enemy within each of us; our primal desire for black-and-white solutions.

I'm feeling so alive today. Wrapped up in a scarf and gloves I trundled into Oxford on the Number 8 bus, wallet, phone, notepaper, pen, keys, and asthma medication already ticked off of the mental checklist. The sun has been out all day. Yes, Oxford really is a world away from Manchester, and it's good to be here. The obligatory dons, gowned and almost universally spectacled, stride along The Broad with intention, but reveal their true nature in fragments of conversations I overhear from the obligatory bench nearby, which, in its turn, is next to the obligatory bin. Full, but not overflowing. "It's the bloody feminists." Their true nature revealed, "conservative", yes, critical but not Critical. Conservatism can be the least critical of all criticisms, planting its roots in the acid soil of a fictionalised past, but, we must admit it, Criticism's branches often overhang the conservative fence, and we can only hope that the conservatives exercise their right to get out the lopping shears and remind Criticism where it belongs. In Oxford dons are successful in their field for being excellent in a subtle brand of conformity. In Manchester you conform to a canon apart, dripping in postmodern self-annihilation and basking in the city's own neon glow. In Oxford you rejoice and despair as you hear a rah-rah-rah eight-year-old explaining the complexities of Good Nutrition to his forty-something mother.

My branches have grown over Oxford's conservative fence. It can feel so comfortable but you know something's wrong. I look forward to having my branches lopped back to Manchester. There is criticism and there is Criticism. There is success and there is Success. I'm going to plant some leylandii.

It's great to see that the Frauenkirche in Dresden has been finished and reconsecrated. The rebuilding of the church, a process which cost €180m, was one of the first priorities for the city after the fall of communism across eastern Europe. I find it intriguing that a religious site was one of the first expressions of the city's new-found liberty, and, conversely, that its state of ruin was a powerful political statement for fifty years after the war ended. Evidence of a secularised Europe? I think not. I would like to go back to Dresden and see the Frauenkirche reopened. Stuart, Alex and I went there last year, but only the crypt was open to the public.

The population rails against religion because our psychic inheritance now tells us it is an opiate, agent of oppression, and fomenter of war. It can be all of these things. But the story of the Frauenkirche reminds us in no uncertain terms that it can be a great force for human liberty and freedom of association.