A dialogue and two aphorisms:Cable 'news' = MTV for senior citizens.

I. *
John Cage: Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

Thrasymachus: But it's against company policy to dream.

JC: [momentary silence]... Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

T: But my employer would have me fired were I to engage in this activity. And yet, you say that human beings need to dream always.

JC: As to the statement about your employer, I can only take your word for it. As to the matter of human beings dreaming, yes. Human beings need to dream always.

T: Would you have me fired from my job?

JC: I would no more have you fired from your job than I would have you receive a promotion and a raise in pay. I would no more have you receive a promotion and raise in pay than I would have you drink your coffee with two lumps of sugar, rather than your usual one lump, during your morning coffee break: the coffee break that you take in the large foyer outside your office, in which you sit facing the same direction as the Rauschenberg painting that hangs in the foyer of the adjoining house .


II.
There's no sense in despair. This isn't to say that there's no sense in your having been led to despair. Quite the opposite! It remains, however, that there's no sense in despair.


III.
Cable news -- all of it: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Whatever Else -- is not news. But don't hate it for what it's not. Hate it instead for what it is: MTV for Senior Citizens.



* These do not represent the words or ideas -- real or imagined -- of the late John Cage. They are instead wholly the creation of our blogger. Same = true as regards the portrayal of Thrasymachus.

Slavoj Žižek on authoritarian capitalism, other horrors.

In an interview, broadcast on Icelandic television (the date is unknown to me), Slavoj Žižek argues that the Left needs to take notice of the decoupling of capitalism and democracy, and--in the example of China, whose lead smaller states have begun to follow--the disturbing advance of authoritarian capitalism. Also discussed is biotechnology, the implications of which, he argues, traditional and current ethical discourses are ill-equipped to handle.

Some Hates/Loves (ala Westwood & McLaren)

Sex was the name of the boutique owned and operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, located at 430 King's Road, London. McLaren, of course, became the manager of the Sex Pistols before his megalomania, incompetence and clashes of ego with John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon precipitated the band's disintegration.

Although Westwood and McLaren were in the business of selling clothes -- designed by Westwood, who appropriated period and street fashions -- the couple's real stock in trade was anti-establishmentarianism. They set out to tap into a growing and restless market of misfits; unemployed kids from the projects, as well as refugees of lower-middle-class suburbs, occupying condemned buildings in the economic and cultural wasteland of inner-city London. Westwood and McLaren attracted a clientèle whose sense of fashion was united its contempt for the hypocrisy, excess and bourgeois myopia of anything related to hippie culture.

Neither McLaren nor Westwood has ever been noted primarily for possessing business acumen. They frequently remodeled their store and changed its inventory out of boredom rather than to capitalize on sales. Initially calling their shop Let It Rock, which peddled Teddy Boy regalia, they moved on to edgier and funnier pastures with the advent of Sex, which specialized in rubber clothing, assorted accoutrements and paraphernalia, and -- most importantly -- tee-shirts emblazoned with snarky or confrontational slogans.

One such tee-shirt declared: "You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on!" Beneath this manifesto appeared a list of pop culture and political references under the headings Hates and Loves. It is in the spirit of that pioneering tee-shirt that I shall undertake to improvise some Hates and Loves of my own. Or, rather, some Nos and Yeses. And since negation is an act of creation, let us begin with the former:

No!
audiophilia
blinders
blogs
Brooklyn
cant
ear fatigue
determinism as despair
Jim Derogatis
'expertise' as a stand-in for persuasiveness
Sasha Frere-Jones
Nancy Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
the herd
the hive
Sam Harris
Hilary
Christopher Hitchens (soused fatso, turncoat, fascist)
Peter Hitchens (bigot & mouth-breather)
Marx, mis- and shallow readings of
meritocracy, the concept of
NPR
.mp3s
'objectivists', from The Unabomber to Alan Greenspan
Peter, Bjorn and John (or whatever it's called)
scientism
Spiritualized
standardized tests (& all other forms of eugenics)
Stereolab after Sound-Dust
Sid Vicious
David Foster Wallace since 1999

Yes!
Anthony Braxton
Lester Bangs
Barack
cigarettes
cigarettes, jazz-
John Coltrane
daydreaming
eloquence
Brian Eno
Thomas Frank
good luck, not underestimating the importance of
historicism
the Hohner Pianet, model T
jazz
Mark Kozelek
Herbert Marcuse
Marx
Sean O'Hagan
Jim O'Rourke
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Last Metro
Lewis H. Lapham
John Lydon
Spacemen 3
thought
vinyl
.wav files
Slavoj Žižek

Reminder

From Karl Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," 1844.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked.

The words of Herbert Marcuse

A quotation from Herbert Marcuse, taken from the chapter "The Research of Total Administration" in his book One Dimensional Man:

Functional communication is only the outer layer of the one-dimensional universe in which man is trained to forget -- to translate the negative into the positive so that he can continue to function, reduced but fit and reasonably well. The institutions of free speech and freedom of thought do not hamper the mental coordination with the established reality. What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms -- a translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and reality by weakening the negative power of thought.....

[In empirical research,] "[c]oncept" is taken to designate the mental representation of something that is understood, comprehended, known as the result of a process of reflection. This something may be an object of daily practice, or a situation, a society, a novel. In any case, if they are comprehended (begriffen; auf ihren Begriff gebracht), they have become objects of thought, and as such, their content and meaning are identical with and yet different from the real objects of immediate experience. "Identical" in as much as the concept denotes the same thing; "different" in as much as the concept is the result of a reflection which has understood the thing in the concept (and in the light) of other things which did not appear in the immediate experience and which "explain" the thing (mediation).

If the concept never denotes one particular concrete thing, if it is always abstract and general, it is so because the concept comprehends more and other than a particular thing -- come universal condition or relation which is essential to the particular thing, which determines the form in which it appears as a concrete object of experience. If the concept of anything concrete is the product of mental classification, organization, and abstraction, these mental processes lead to comprehension only inasmuch as they reconstitute the particular thing in its universal condition and relation, thus transcending its immediate appearance toward its reality.

By the same token, all cognitive concepts have a transitive meaning: they go beyond descriptive reference to particular facts. And if the facts are those of society, the cognitive concepts also go beyond any particular content of facts -- into the processes and conditions on which the respective society rests, and which enter into all particular facts, making, sustaining, and destroying the society. By virtue of their reference to this historical totality, cognitive concepts transcend all operational context, but their transcendence is empirical because it renders the facts recognizable as that which they really are.

The "excess" of meaning over and above the operational concept illuminates the limited and even deceptive form in which the facts are allowed to be experienced. Therefore the tension, the discrepancy, the conflict between the concept and the immediate fact -- the thing concrete; between the word that refers to the concept and that which refers to the things. Therefore the notion of the "reality of the universal." Therefore, also the uncritical, accommodating character of those modes of thought which treat concepts as mental devices and translate universal concepts into terms with particular, objective referents.

Where these reduced concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false concreteness -- a concreteness isolated from the conditions which constitute its reality. In this context, the operational treatment of the concept assumes a political function. The individual and his behavior are analysed in a therapeutic sense -- adjustment to his society. Thought and expression, theory and practice are to be brought in line with the facts of his existence without leaving room for the conceptual critique of these facts.

The therapeutic character of the operational concept shows forth most clearly where conceptual thought is methodically placed into the service of exploring and improving the existing social conditions, within the framework of the existing societal institutions -- in industrial sociology, motivation research, marketing and public opinion studies.

If the given form of society is and remains the ultimate frame of reference for theory and practice, there is nothing wrong with this sort of sociology and psychology. It is more human and more productive to have good labor-management relations than bad ones, to have harmony instead of conflict between the desires of the customers and the needs of business and politics.

But the rationality of this kind of social science appears in a different light if the given society, while remaining the frame of reference, becomes the object of a critical theory which aims at the very structure of this society, present in all particular facts and conditions and determining their place and their function. Then their ideological and political character becomes apparent, and the elaboration of adequately cognitive concepts demands going beyond the fallacious concreteness of positivist empiricism. the therapeutic and operational concept becomes false to the extent to which it insulates and atomizes the facts, stabilizes them within the repressive whole, and accepts the terms of this whole as the terms of the analysis. The methodological translation of the universal into the operational concept then becomes repressive reduction of thought.