Icarian Leap

Michel de Certeau, standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre in NYC, observes that to view a city in its totality is an ecstasy of reading - and we've all been atop tall buildings or hills or in a hot air balloon - well, I haven't done the last, but I want to. And certainly, there is a distinctly pleasurable moment in one's ascent when the city, the streets, the corners where you smoke a fag or the alley that cats pee in, all of this mess and smell, become a clean map, a diagram on which lovers point out their little window on an autumn day. I used to love making maps myself as a kid (should have been a warning to my parents) and would spend hours detailing the metro stops and squares of cities built in my head. Not only those, also side cut-out schemata of things such as submarines, commercial space-jets, underground French fortifications (with homoerotic showers included in the complicated structure. Actually, same with the submarines, not the space-jet though) and naturally whole countries with felt-tip-pen-blue rivers and strictly enforced border controls. A fetish perhaps of some sort is revealed in this child's play, fetishism of the eye above, God, the observer, the narrator-creator. It is also a fatally flawed position, one which tempts plans and grids out of our organic brains, where the space of planning is born, where the misery of thousands is formed, where lives are erased to be put into a quantifiable mould. (read this!)

And what is it that bothers me about it? Well, for one the way in which de Certeau calls going back to street level an 'Icarian Fall', a descent from lofty heights to the squalor and chaos of our ant-farm cities. But I do want to believe that on the contrary, it's exactly this sort of Icarian Leap that we need as thinkers and humans, a voluntary and pleasant descent into that which escapes the total view of the plan, the cat pee and the graffiti, the unplanned, unconscious and unexpected that makes life as a cog bearable. I myself have been unable to complete this leap and still derive pleasure from maps and diagrams, but perhaps thinking about it will foster some sense of humility and familiarity with the street level city and not its abstract cousin.

In a sense, this is a nod to another of de Certeau's legacies - the belief that living everyday lives can profoundly change our society as a tool of resistance; while this thinking may have its appeal, especially to the non-revolutionary young adults of today who participate in social change by liking it on Facebook, it is also problematic. While its efficacy can perhaps be defended in the long term (who knows, maybe using canvas bags really will banish unfairness), it is also partly to blame for the acquiescence with the status quo, providing a comforting reassurance that big action is not necessary, that a critical mass of people using the tiniest forms of resistance can successfully challenge the hidden oppression in our society. But as the recent clearing-out of Occupy XYZ encampments shows, the police and the repressive apparatus of the state-capital still crack down on open, engaged opposition - perhaps this is due to the possibility of its success, which is a good reason to leave the house. And on that note, where are my keys?

Anti Hayek

This morning, I for some reason remembered Hayek (Austrians have featured heavily in my dreams of late), causing in me much righteous anger and resentment.

A long time ago, I admit I read Hayek's The Fatal Conceit and thought, hmm, perhaps this poster-boy of neoliberalism does have a point about the the left's pastoral fantasies of a pre-market society, which I believe he terms as atavistic. I too was often disappointed by this indolent belief that all of man's problems can be solved by a return to an Ovidian Aetas Aurea along the lines of the Fleet Foxes lyric - if I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore. My family have owned orchards and though the work is hard and rewarding, I doubt there are enough orchards for us all to work till we're sore and then alcoholize our bodies in tired happiness. While a pre-market, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society may present itself as tempting alternative, this is only really viable for a privileged group of kids - the world has been changed and icons such as the Pruitt-Igoe estate pictured here have won; ironic considering the demolition of said estate has been termed as a 'victory against modernism'.

Hayek would of course retort that the sort of brutal spatial planning, the rationalising gaze which has exploded time and harnessed space, is in itself a child of the socialist mind. As such, the neoliberal victory over the excesses of etatist high-modernism is to be welcomed as a liberating force. At best, this sort of victory over the deficiencies of planning can be compared to the neoliberal victory against bigotry, which now has us all enslaved in the same consumerist galley regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. A modernity which, at least in the case of gay subculture, has transformed dingy, illicit loci of sexuality into clean, modern facilities where cards are accepted and where there is to be absolutely no masturbation in the jacuzzi.

A modernity therefore, with a kinder face, a modernity of a more insipid kind. To argue that this modernity is anything but a product of our current mode of production, that of late-capitalism, is impossible. Though high-modernism certainly has been a central thought in societies of planned state-capitalism (such as the USSR), it has just as much been a hallmark of thinking in the so-called free world, as well as the third world. Rationality in planning human society is no more opposed to capitalism than a truly free market is part of it. (For a good example of a truly free market, liberated from the constrains of the state and its rationalising, socialist tendencies, I suggest a stroll through the bustling streets of Mogadishu.)

Hayek remains in my thoughts with his further elaboration on his surprise, feigned no doubt, at the number of educated, intelligent men and women who persist (!!) in their belief in socialism and, by implication, a high-modernist project guided by rational thought. If one then takes this initial outlook and combines it perhaps with a critique of high-modernism such as that of James C. Scott (Seeing like a State, 1998), a neat and comprehensive critique of the rationally planned arises, proposing in its stead an 'organic', self-regulating, 'natural' state. And while Scott's criticism remains an important tool in seeing through state-sponsored fantasies of progress and reform, well-meaning as though they may have been, Hayek's call towards a natural state remains on the other hand, corollary to a different fatal conceit, that of the free market.

Surely, the quest for a natural or organic state is the truly atavistic, and perhaps more worryingly offers a base of legitimacy which is as succinct as it is flawed - the mark of the best sort of political argument. By establishing the link between nature and capitalism (or, the 'free market' as it is called), by extrapolating the history of capitalism beyond even early humanoid societies of give and take into an organic state, a formula is created; capitalism is organic and natural, hence all alternatives are not only unnatural, but will fail with great cost to human life and dignity.
(A good popular-science documentary on this sort of topic is All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis - for the visual types among you)

It is, I am just realising, difficult to avoid the devalued and inflated language of charities and part-time revolutionaries when talking about the 'cost' of capitalism; what more can be said of the human and environmental costs, what eloquence and which language or font can elevate and spell out more clearly the path dependency that holds us from realising our potential? None I'm afraid, because apart from a few hundred brave and freezing bodies occupying (quasi)public spaces in New York, London and elsewhere, we are all at home, all content, all disappointed, nowhere near starving, but stuck in temporary jobs, or jobs we hate, under neon lights that strip away the soul, tadpoles in a big lake.

So really, what should surprise us more is that this great number of perfectly healthy, intelligent and respectable individuals still believe that free market capitalism is the best and most 'natural' option we have.

Trial run for a chapter

Ok, so, this is a trial. Below you will find a chapter from a work that characters in a story of mine are using. I just wanna test it and see if it, well, works. If this style and content is something you think worthwhile, or if I should just go weed my mum's garden or take up building famous landmarks out of cigarette boxes.
Thank you.
Oh, the story is, well sort of about an expedition from a quasi-Byzantine, post-Roman world up to the far north in search of a bird called the Gamayun, which is a very special bird that can convey the thoughts of the dead, which as we all know live in the far north, beyond the endless birch tree forest.

On the Northern Pull, on the bird of the dead and other ex-dogmatic phenomena of the area known presently as the Sclavic Myr.


Balthasar of Gorgona (the one-armed) scribit.



It is written in sources of the late Silver Age of our illustrious Empire, long may the rule of the True Faith guide us, that it is in the North that the great cone of the earth is suspended amidst the celestial bodies. Thus, it is the North that is the divine cardinal point, as the Dogma teaches us and as the ancients before us had already surmised and told of their gods residing in a northern mountain of unknown geographical position and appearance.


Our efforts at explaining the true nature of the Northern pull remained vexed until the epoch of the Tetrarchy, not otherwise known for great science or veracity and perhaps best remembered for its culinary and ceremonial advances. It is in the reign of the seventh of the third quart of the Tetrarchs that an important discovery was made, yet due academic procedure must first be paid to the issue of dating this discovery and the reader will surely understand and show patience in the face of digression, for digression is a divine prerogative.


The counting of eras during the reign of the Four following the collapse of the Imperial House of Severi remains to this day an affair fraught with difficulty with several lineages from which eras can be constructed across four different quarts - areas of the Empire. Thus, – Theophilos of Nicaea in his seminal work On the Correct and True Counting of Eras appeals onto all University to use instead his counting system, which counts backwards from the end of the Tetrarchy, say ’24 years before the end’ would thus point to the year the discovery was made, but the omission of the name of particular Tetrarch and Quart makes it impossible for us to divine where an event occurred from date alone. While this may provide some welcome simplicity, and every scholar who has ventured into the bowels of the libraries under the Constantian Academy will appreciate simplicity, there are other issues with his method. Since many of the noble families which still grace our Empire with their presence are directly related to one of the more than 26 Tetrarchs, the somewhat negative tone of Theophilos’s system has made it unpopular with scholars whose ambitions lie outside the Academy walls, where patronage and an unbesmirched name count for more than love of truth or parsimony.


Be that as it may dear reader, let us return to the questions of the Northern Pull, discovered as it were, some time ago by a shepherd, so it is rumoured, who was at the time in the service of Julius of Pola, a librarian and archiver of no particular talent. While it is not clear what a handsome shepherd was in fact doing in the service of an ageing Julius, it is unequivocally clear that it was the shepherd who showed the librarian a trick of cork and needle. Nowadays an experiment known and taught in schools across our land, it was for its time a true revelation. The needle, stuck through a thin cork and placed in a bowl of water, persistently pointed northwards. The librarian, though by no means a man of wit or sense of history, knew it significant and invited his colleagues to observe the phenomenon.


Though some grumbled that the needle did not in fact point to the true North as defined by the local cartographers, a consensus was reached that the cartographers of that particular provincial capital were not reliable, as visitors carrying bulky maps made of interlocking slates of wood around the city getting lost and, subsequently, robbed, would no doubt affirm.


What was this force then, which pulled the needle, which holds our world under the Heavens and which sucks all light and life, all thought and action towards the unknown North? The theologians attached to the Church of Holy Wisdom were quick to conclude that it is none other than God, or at least the Holy Spirit, or at the very least some other manifestation of His, which does not contravene the amassed dogmata of our Church. On the other side were the neo-mathematicians, a relatively new school of thought, which argued in turn that the Northern pull was nothing but a given certainty, a consequence of the way our world is constructed, nothing but nature, just as leaves will fall from a tree and rivers will not flow upwards, so the light and soul (and now it seems, metal) are drawn to the North.


It occurred to none of the schools or scientists (and there were many more, with debates about the issue raging for decades after the shepherd’s death) to visit the North. It was after all a land beyond the land beyond the wall of our Empire on the Danubium, a land beyond the mountains which our guards glance towards with anxiety and fear. Though goods of some artifice do come across the northern border, they pale in comparison to those coming from the south, let alone from our fluid eastern borders, where fabrics of unimaginable sheen come from as far as Seres to be exchanged for our automata or Italic glass. No, the north was a land of darkness, a land not often travelled before, dear reader, my humble expedition, which fortunately occurred after the end of the Tetrarchy and can thus be dates securely in the 3rd year of the rule of Constantinos the Great, Unifier of Empire, Defender of Faith.


It is clear to an old man such as myself that the impetuous reader will once more urge me to begin for once the story which caused most sensation in our capital, a story known by all and which has transformed my name into a target of both derision and outright devotion. The story of the fantastic bird Kamaion, or Gamayun, or Chamaeon, as the various spellings will have it. And worry not dear reader, I will not venture into this particular vector of digression on spelling and the evolution of our spoken word. Yet.

Powerful diseases

Recently (well, since last week) I've been involved in a new exciting medical emergency (or hypochondriac episode, depends who I'm talking to). I've developed a strange pain in my big toe on my left foot. It doesn't seem to be from an injury or anything like that, so Dr. Google suggested it may be gout! The Disease of Kings and King of Diseases as it was affectionately called. (That's morbus dominorum et dominus morborum for y'all latin folk.)

Such titles notwithstanding, it's quite an interesting one, gout. I'm not going to go into the minutiae of symptoms & prognoses for sufferers (not sure I'm one anyway), but it just struck me as quite fitting that a disease which mainly affected those able to eat, drink and not work (or not die young because of a flu), has received so much attention in literature and vernacular culture. I suppose it should not strike me as strange in a society which spent $400 million on a novel erectile disfunction drug (Yes, vitamin V) in the first 3 months after its launch. (Alison, K. (2000), The economics of Viagra, Health Affairs, 19 (2): 147-157). I could do a bit of research to see how much we spend on treating malaria or just malnutrition, but I think it will depress me too much.

White Material (2010), Claire Denis

The way Denis weaves the story is exquisite in the way it limits and binds us to the role of helpless observer. The story is laid out from the beginning; nothing is hidden, no surprises are left untold. Yet conditioned by our hopes for an ending somewhat less despondent, we are trapped in the same denial, the same stubbornness as Marie. With the camera following her from behind, like children after a rushed parent, I too was dependent on her, followed her, shared my lot with her and ultimately felt her anger and despair as she punishes the man who made her love the illusion.
The ending was always however dolefully clear, announced by the helicopter crew overhead, confirmed by Ange and Louis, who told her bluntly that the helicopter came especially for her and her family, not them.
The Africans are often blunt in this unromanticised Africa, saved from a naive primitiveness and propelled forward as the rational, contemporary beings of the world they grudgingly share with the morally and financially impoverished White Material.

Enter the Void (2009), Gaspard Noe

Gaspard Noe is stuck. Stuck with the label of enfant terrible, which he worked so diligently to obtain. Remember the facetious notice to sensitive viewers to leave the cinema in Seul Contre Tous, remember the 9-minute rape scene in Irreversible - he shocked the viewers, brought on a slew of insults but essentially, the shock and awe tactic was always a bit of a distraction, a sleigh of hand in a magician's repertoire. 

Alas, it has now become clear that he has created his own "shocking" world in which he can become an utter conformist, reiterating ad nauseam his language composed of nouns of strobes and verbs of horror, with some adverbial dialogue, which only serves as a wiry skeleton on which the "shocking" can be spooned generously. 

Oscar, a young drug-dealer living in Tokyo (apparently because his deceased parents were Japanophiles?) has a sister.  They live in a small flat which opens onto, NO, is entered by the neon of the streets of Tokyo. He does acid, he does pills, coke, Tibetan mysticism, he does DMT and his friend's mother. 

His sister Linda is a stripper, his friend Alex a (crap) painter living in a flat full of glow-in-the-dark trinkets. None of this is particularly important or interesting for the semblance of Plot on which Noe can live out his visual ambitions. 

To put it short, the backbone of the film is a new age narrative with a few wikiFreudian elements (older lover=dead mother; oral drugs point at fixation with mother's breasts... Yawn.) While Irreversible dealt with male sexuality, vengeance, the cruelty of desire, Enter the Void deals with the banal. 

To put it generously, it hinges on the creation of a "moment of death-tautology" (which Noe presumably read in wishy-washy Haruki Murakami, of all people!!), in which the recently deceased person's mind creates a mental loop in which the mind survives, fashioning it out of fragments of visual and philosophical bricks which are lying around the brain. So, Oscar creates his own Tokyo where he is a ghost stuck in this world (just as was foretold by Alex's explanation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Chekov's guns blazing, his fears and worries expressed while alive happen below, such as his sister's pregnancy, but Oscar has been reduced to a floating eye, unable to intervene and presumably suffering because of what he sees. The visuals here are indeed stunning and, apart from the superfluous strobing, testify to Noe's technical prowess.

The problem of course is, no one feels anything for Oscar, whose character is flat. The more we see of his childhood, his traumas and the events which led up to his death, the more distant we become. My suspicion is that Noe knows this, but the value of bad acting and a poor script being touted as cinema is debatable at best. The film that was meant to shock merely discomforts the viewer and leaves little in terms of legacy. Ultimately, Noe is a brilliant VJ, but I'm not convinced that's enough. I do agree with the New Yorker - stay at least for the credits.