Political machinery

"Enmeshed in the political machinery, we cannot possibly penetrate to the factual. Enclosed in the sphere of the exclusively political, we can find no means to relieve the present situation; its 'natural end' is the technically perfect suicide of the human race."

-Martin Buber
"Abstract and Concrete"
Pointing This Way, 230

Phantom Threat?

Israel vows to pacify Hezbollah

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the campaign against the militants would continue "as long as necessary" to free its captured soldiers and ensure Hezbollah is not a threat."

Sounds eerily familar. How can you ensure that Hezbollah is no longer a threat? Bomb the living shit out of the whole of Lebanon apparently. Lebanese president Lahoud has even offered diplomatic talks. But if the plan is to "purify" the region of Hezbollah, I guess nothing will stop you. Man, the whole region might end up being a crater after this most recent crisis is done with.

Set it ablaze

"I am afraid of the truth...One must be silent, if one can't give any help...For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed."

-Franz Kafka

A politics of de-politicization

"To a certain extent there are real conflicts of interests between all groups - national, religious, economic, social - which live together. As long as these conflicts are dealt within the domain of life itself, solutions are found. These solutions may take the form of negative compromise with both sides narrowing their demands, but may also take the form of positive, synthetic, creative compromise, that is, the creation of new life circumstances which require cooperation and make it possible. Matters are different if the conflicts pass from the domain of life to the domain of politics, and are different to the extent that politics overpowers life. What then happens is what I call political "surplus" conflict. Politics, seeking to retains its domination of life, has an interest in treating the interests of the various groups as if they were irreconcilable. But since this is in fact not so, politics has to make it so. And it accomplishes this by heightening the real conflict of interests to the point that it becomes non-real, albeit furnished with all the terrible force of political illusion. The politics of a group produces within its members a sense of conflict with proportions much greater than those of the real conflict, and accords it a different, seemingly absolute, character. The difference between the real conflict and the politically induced imagined conflict is what I have referred to as political "surplus" conflict. Although this surplus has real vital influence on the politically active part of the group, by political propaganda this segment gains total hegemony over all the others; that it, it achieves the dominance of life by politics."

- Martin Buber
"A Tragic Conflict?"
May 1946
From A Land of Two Peoples, p. 187

"Here I stand, I can do no other"

"For truly, although politics is something done with the head, it is certainly not something done with the head alone. On this point the conviction-moralists are entirely correct. But whether one ought to act on the basis of an ethics of conviction or one of responsibility, and when one should do the one or the other, these are not things about which one can give instructions to anybody. There is just one thing one can say in these times of excitement - not, you believe, a thing one can say in these times of excitement - not, you believe, a 'sterile' form of excitement (although excitement is not always the same as true passion) - if, suddenly, conviction-politicians spring up all around, proclaiming, 'The world is stupid and base (gemein), not I. Responsibility for the consequences does not fall on me but on the others, in whose service I work and whose stupidity or baseness I shall eradicate', then I say plainly that I want to know how much inner weight is carried by this ethic of conviction. For it is my impression that, in nine out of ten, I am dealing with windbags, people who are intoxicated with romantic sensations but who do not truly feel what they are taking upon themselves. Such conduct hold little human interest for me and it most certainly does not shake me to the core. On the other hand it is immensely moving when a mature person (whether old or young) who feels with his whole soul the responsibility he bears for the real consequences of his actions, and who acts on the basis of an ethics of responsibility, says at some point, 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' That is something genuinely human and profoundly moving. For it must be possible for each of us to find ourselves in such a situation at some point if we are not inwardly dead. In this respect, the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human being who is capable of having a 'vocation for politics'.

- Max Weber
"The Profession and Vocation of Politics"
367-368

He's a what?!?

Idol of the Crowds (1937)

Plot summary:

Retired hockey player Johnny Hansen (John Wayne), in order to make money to enlarge his chicken farm, returns to the game and leads his team into the championship series. Just before the series starts, he is offered a bribe to throw the games but refuses. An attempt is made on his life which results in Bobby (Billy Barrud as Billy Barrud as usual), the team's mascot, being injured.

The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

The very utterance, "instrumental post-rock genre", would make anybody cringe. But a band from Texas named Explosions in the Sky (Ibid.) are a reason why the genre may one day come into the mainstream. Of course, this particular band has had brushes with the mainstream limelight, most recently contributing all but a couple tracks to the "Friday Night Lights" movie soundtrack and had some speculating about their clairvoyant abilities after a 2001 release - erroneously thought to have come out September 10 - which had the words "This plane will crash tomorrow" scribbled on the album cover. But these guys produce some wicked music. After checking out their 2003 album, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, I can actually understand why instrumental post-rock might be appealing to plebs and bougies alike: the ability to listen to an album while doing other things, like reading, cooking, or fucking, and have the music contribute rather than detract from the activity. I can't really describe the album...it just has a different affect upon every listen. I just know it helps me focus, which is probably attributable to the fact that there are no subpar vocals tacked on to the music. I am not by any stretch a fan of the "instrumental post-rock genre". But, I have to admit that there's one quality album out there. One slight thing though about this album, it should have just been one track - everything flows too well to discern where one track ends and another begins. And yeah, they're Emo, but Emo in the just right amount. One of the reviews I came across - I think it was pitchfork - put this album into the proper perspective: serious, but never on the verge of self-parody. Good album, although the cover may be a tad cliche. Plus, I think you could do your taxes to it, be in a decent mood, carry the 1, and not get audited - which is always nice.

Camus in goal?

Camus - the goalkeeper?

The rest of the article was the usual mish-mash about the Outsider, the rebel figure, and the novel's affect on disaffected youth. Nothing new, although characterizing Camus as the laureate of the cool teenager is getting old. The real gem is that soccer jersey!

Vanity is a very widespread quality...

"Vanity is a very widespread quality, and perhaps no one is completely free of it. In academic and scholarly circles it is a kind of occupational disease. In the case of the scholar, however, unattractive though this quality may be, it is relatively harmless in the sense that it does not, as a rule, interfere with the pursuit of knowledge. Things are quite different in the case of the politician. The ambition for power is an inevitable means (Mittel) with which he works. 'The instinct for power', as it is commonly called, is thus indeed one of his normal qualities. The sin against the holy spirit of his profession begins where this striving for power becomes detached from the task in hand (unsachlich) and becomes a matter of purely personal self-intoxication instead of being place entirely at the service of the 'cause'. For there are ultimately just two deadly sins in the area of politics: a lack of objectivity and - often, although not always, identical with it - a lack of responsibility. Vanity, the need to thrust one's person as far as possible into the foreground, is what leads the politician most strongly into the temptation of committing one or other (or both) of these sins, particularly as the demagogue is forced to count on making an 'impact', and for this reason is always in danger both of becoming a play-actor and of taking the responsibility for his actions too lightly and being concerned only with the 'impression' he is making. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glittering appearance of power rather than its reality, while his irresponsibility tempts him to enjoy power for its own sake, without any substantive purpose. For although, or rather precisely because, power is the inevitable means of all politics, and the ambition for power therefore one of its driving forces, there is no more pernicious distortion of political energy than when the parvenu boasts of his power and vainly mirrors himself in the feeling of power - or indeed any and every worship of power for its own sake. The mere 'power politician', a type whom an energetically promoted cult is seeking to glorify in Germany as elsewhere, may give the impression of strength, but in fact his actions merely lead into emptiness and absurdity."

- Max Weber
"The Profession and Vocation of Politics"
Weber: Political Writings, 354

Mimesis and Derivation

Everything old is new...again. What once was stale is fresh again, with a new spin. There is creativity in paying homage...unless you're straight up jacking their shit - then you're Tarantino or Kobe or Elvis or whoever. Imitation is the highest form of flattery...unless you're completely biting their shit - then you're just being a fuckwad. Mimesis is an instinct ingrained within living creatures; survive, get some, pass on material, and all that stuff. Imitate what works. Pillage it and swear ignorance. Somehow, that's the law of the jungle...and of the rat race.

Everything's been done? Of course it has. Nothing is as groundbreaking as it claims to be. Some would say that the beauty of an experience can only be grasped through the eyes of a child who sees it for the first time. Art is the gaze...the gaze gives meaning. This is Rameau's nephew looking vapidly at a painting...or Baudelaire staring at his dark lover-slave's unshaven bush...or you staring at the television. Everything old is new again...or as Charles Manson says through the lips of Seth McFarlene, "If I haven't seen it, its new to me." Leave it to Charles Manson to convey - however esoterically - the point of that show's perpetual obsession with the 80's. "I love it, its new to me...or its new to me, again." Nothing is as fresh as the morning dew hugging blades of green grass - but let's not get romantic about it. Let's just admit it - there is no purity in the creative act. It is a derivation from sources that often go unacknowledged. For he who claims to be the Creator, the genius, or the radical is as generic as they come.

Are we doomed to be derivations - fated to produce imperfect copies of things done far better by superior talents? The vintage becomes the archtype...the plagarist simply a stereotype. Fuck that shit. On the shoulders of giants, my ass. You gotta know...you must know...its all been done before. Don't bite it. Don't reify it...and hoist it up as the idol-redux. Annihilate it! Overwhelm it! Push it to unknown horizons. Don't be like Tarantino and make a fucking scrapbook of "cool-hipster" shit. Don't do like Kobe and just be Mike. Can't just cover it in luccite or sprinkles or sacchrine and churn out homage and nostaglia. Free it from inanity, release it from repetition, help it make love to the absurd, embrace the insane...give it life, man. Give it life.

Kafka - A Little Fable

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but those long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

-Franz Kafka

Thoreau - Civil Disobedience

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs."

- Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
Walden and Other Writings, 87

"I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

-Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
96-97

"No responsible person remains a stranger to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never becomes a maxim and the fulfillment of it never a habit. Any command that a great character takes to himself in the course of his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a concrete way."

- Martin Buber
"The Education of Character"
Between Man and Man, 135

What Enlightenment really is?

"The vision of "what should be" - independent though it may sometimes appear of personal will - is yet inseparable from a critical and fundamental relationship to the existing condition of humanity."

- Martin Buber
Paths in Utopia, 7

This quote can be related to Kant's "What is Enlightenment?". Kant posits that human freedom cannot exist without limits. Kant proposes a critical approach, i.e. freeing oneself from self-imposed immaturity. But, as he intimates in WIE, a critical approach to knowledge is not done in a space detached from "a fundamental relationship to the existing condition of humanity". However, Kant's qualifier - "obey and debate as much you want" - places a strict limit on such a critical relationship. Man, as he puts forth, remains beholden to the order that secures his very existence and stabilizes the world he lives in.

"But only a ruler who is himself enlightened and has no fear of phantoms, yet who likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security, may say what no republic would dare to say: Argue as much as you like, but obey! ...A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." (Kant, What is Enlightenment?, Political Writings, 59)

Kant is fully aware of the paradoxical nature of this. In positing this, he inevitably concedes how he could not circumvent the set of assumptions put forth by Hobbes - namely that the state must be present to impose order, the grounds necessary for civilization. The Leviathan is not a beast, but a machine - a composition of individuals united in a grand collective.

"This spirit of freedom is also spreading abroad, even where it has to struggle with outward struggles imposed by governments which misunderstand their own function. For such governments can now witness a shining example of how freedom may exist without in the least jeopardising public concord and the unity of the commonwealth. Men will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artifical measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it." (Kant, WIE, 59)

The limit Kant imposes on maturity is one he willingly inherited from Hobbes. The modern state or Leviathan - by definition - claims to deal with the existing condition of humanity by securing the conditions under which individuals can act freely.

"Thus once the germ on which nature has lavished most care - man's inclination and vocation to think freely - has developed within this hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act freely. Eventually, it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity." (Kant, WIE, 59-60)

Of course, the assumption is that the sovereign is "enlightened", like Frederick the Great, in allowing his subjects to pursue enlightenment. The limitation to this is that governments and those who head them are not always enlightened and often percieve critical and contrary perspectives as "dangerous" to their own power - or under the cloak of legitimacy - detrimental to the existence of the nation-state. So in place of education, they provide propaganda. In place of maturity, they facilitate immaturity. The insecure sovereign, the insanely paranoid leader, is like Nero - invariably on the verge of setting his kingdom on fire, to purify it of those who oppose him. Kant's vision for enlightenment has never materialized. The situation is far more complex than "obey and argue as much as you want". The skillful duplicity of those in power throws a wrench in Kant's plans - placing the emphasis on OBEY, and negating the rest.

Freedom...

“Freedom…is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.” (Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, p. 440)

A man locked shackles – shackles to which he gave consent – fell to his knees and shouted, “I want freedom more than life”. A passerby stopped, bent down, and whispered, “One can live, but not die, for freedom.” As the sun beats on his reddening brow, the man in shackles asks, “How can I live in order to find it?” The passerby replies, “Live rather than search and then you will be free,” and walks away.

Urge to kill...rising...rising

So when the summer heat gets to you this year, may this image provide some relief.

Thabo Mbeki

“Our greatest struggle is to raise the consciousness of the people.”

- Thabo Mbeki

Existential Mistrust

“The existential mistrust is indeed no longer, like the old kind, a mistrust of my fellow-man. It is rather the destruction of confidence in existence in general. That we can no longer carry on a genuine dialogue from one camp to the other is the severest symptom of sickness of present-day man. Existential mistrust is this sickness itself. But the destruction of trust in human existence is the inner poisoning of the total human organism from which this sickness stems.” Buber, “Hope for this Hour", Pointing the Way, p. 224