New openDemocracy article

I have a new article called Thoughts on 2013: A Slow Motion Train Wreck on the openDemocracy website

Onward Into the POO

Slightly ashamed that I haven't written anything for this blog for some six months, but the current state of UK politics is so depressing that I don't feel obliged to offer much else in the way of excuse. Anyway, here's a small philological contribution just to keep it rolling.

In a thoughtful essay on the openDemocracy website Professor Cas Mudde recently analysed the prospects for a return to social democracy in Europe. He was not optimistic, expressing a view that "(Real) social democracy is not just unknown to several generations of voters, but it is contradictory to their individualist or ethnicized worldview", a case for which he offered several strong arguments.

I commented on his essay to say that a major part of the problem was the refusal of the rump of New Labour to even utter the words "social democracy". Here's an extract from my comment:

"I believe a crucial first step is purely semantic: getting people to even use the words 'social democrat', which Labour Party people will tie themselves in knots to avoid saying. The fact that for those 30 successful years following WW2 most of Europe and the USA were social democracies *in effect*, though not in name needs to be better explained. The difference between social democracy and authoritarian state socialism needs to be resurrected and preached in non-technical language, since few to the left of Labour appear to understand it. Even Russell Brand's recent quasi-anarchistic TV outburst was couched in a rhetoric that rejected representative democracy and hinted at coercive expropriation - oppositional youth nowadays appear drawn to the worst of anarchism in unholy mixture with the worst of state socialism."

As a sometime dictionary author I'm greatly impressed by the power of language and the need for accurate nomenclature. As well as restoring the meaning and usage of the term "Social Democracy" we need some equivalent that describes the form of wonky capitalism that's been sprouting in the post-2008 epoch in the UK, USA and Europe. I suggest that a suitably descriptive term would be "Property-Owning Oligarchy", or POO for short.

Oh, and a Merry Christmas to one and all!
  

Ressentiment?

ressentiment, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

"We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

A Caustic Prediction Come True

 

A fake bomb detector: Photograph: City of London Police/PA

"Modern society, which up to 1968 went from success to success and was persuaded that it was loved, has since then had to renounce these dreams; it prefers to be feared. It knows full well that 'its innocent air will no longer return.' A thousand conspiracies in favor of the established order tangle and clash almost everywhere, with the overlapping of networks and secret questions or actions always pushed harder; and the process of rapid integration is pushed into each branch of the economy, politics and culture.

The degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and special activities continually grows in all areas of social life. The general conspiracy has become so dense that it is almost out in the open, each of its branches starts to hinder or trouble the others, because all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without exactly knowing why, or encounter each other by chance, yet without recognizing each other with certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate intentions can only be suspected with great difficulty and almost never understood."

Guy Debord: from "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" 1988 (chapter XXX)  

[Read the whole text at http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html]

Still Posting Here!

I haven't given up posting to this blog but recently have been active elsewhere - two pieces published on openDemocracy. I will be continuing to post stuff here though and I've also created Kindle (MOBI) and PDF format books of all my blog posts up to June 2013, for anyone who prefers to read them all in one lump. Download them for free by clicking the cover picture.


Here are the links to my two oD pieces, the first of which is a revised version of my last post here:

The Battle between Countries and Companies

Cool Capitalism: changing principles of protest

THE CRUNCH

With the current outbreak of indignation over tax evasion by multinational corporations, we're finally coming face-to-face with the biggest problem of our times: one more important than the financial crisis, than terrorism or sexual abuse, more immediately important even than global warming. What's at stake is the continued existence of the state as we've known it for the last several centuries, without whose powers none of those other problems are soluble (despite any fairy tales that libertarians and Tea Party whackos may tell you). Without revenues there can be no state, a fact that's perfectly understood by those Republican billionaires whose purchased congressmen are currently preventing the USA from being governed.

The recent visit of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt to London rubbed the point in. Explaining that "if you change the tax laws, we'll obey them", he treated UK PM David Cameron with the amused air of a cheeky schoolboy talking to a nagging teacher, but that amiable levity was a mask for the fact that he now wields more power than a mere PM and knows it. In my current PC Pro column I had this to say about another of the tax-evading internet giants, Facebook:

"Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book 'The Boy Kings' she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and 'companies over countries'. Asked what he meant by the latter he told her 'it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.' So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent of the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away."

Commentators are beginning to wake up to the scale of this problem. For example in a recent blog post Robert Reich notes that while politicians are all talking the talk about ending tax evasion and havens, nothing actually ever gets done about it:

"The same disconnect is breaking out all over the world. The chairman of a British parliamentary committee investigating Google for tax avoidance calls the firm 'devious, calculating, and unethical,' yet British officials court the firm’s CEO as if he were royalty. Prime Minister David Cameron urges tax havens to mend their ways and vows to crack down on tax cheats, yet argues taxes must be low in the UK because 'we’ve got to encourage investment, we’ve got to encourage jobs and I want Britain to be a winner in the global race'. These apparent contradictions are rooted in the same reality: global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining power over nation states."

Of course modern nation states are still more powerful than corporations like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, if only because they make the laws and can enforce them, in the last resort by using a police force and an army which those corporations don't possess. In a sci-fi fantasy film the next step would be for the corporations to buy their own private armies, but that isn't how the real world works - the danger is actually far more insidious than that. It involves a subject I've touched on here in another recent post, the idea of the "surplus wage".

Over the last three decades or so the world's economy has tended to decouple reward from effort, an effect that's visible not just in bankers' bonuses and "fat-cat" managers' salaries, but also in the lifestyle and remuneration of sportsmen, popular entertainers and other celebrities. Slavoj Žižek has analysed this phenomenon in terms of payment of "surplus wages", which are entirely unrelated to actual productivity but get paid to insiders accepted into certain cliques and professions. This phenomenon can be looked upon as a legal way of looting the wider economy. The ineffectuality of the Left's attempts to agitate about the current economic crisis is in part due to the fact that many people who 50 years ago might have taken to the streets in protest, are now pacified by the slim hope of gaining entry to the privileged ranks of these surplus-waged. Methods of entry can include nepotism, winning the lottery, wangling a local government sinecure, starting an internet business, making it as a footballer or conceptual artist, writing a hit tune in your back-bedroom or winning a TV talent show, being discovered as a model, or joining a drug dealing gang.

The very greatest danger we face is that our politicians - those who spend our tax money to run the state supposedly on our behalf - will become entirely suborned by the giant corporations that they're supposed to be taxing, by enrollment into the surplus waged club. There's already ample evidence of this happening, from the instant millionaire status so quickly achieved by the Tony Blairs and Bill Clintons on the international speaking circuits, through various hushed-up bribery scandals of recent years, to the lonely death of Margaret Thatcher in her humble suite at the Ritz. The corporations have most of the money and increasingly most of the power too since they monopolise mass communication channels in ways that our none-too-technically-bright politicians barely comprehend. These corporations are generous in doling out the surplus wage to secure the fidelity of the right people. What if the political class as a whole in effect changes sides, representing only the interests of these corporations? The dismantling of the post-WWII democratic welfare states could proceed unhindered and Chinese authoritarian capitalism would become a template for the future. 

The real Catch-22 is that the contempt for politicians this process engenders merely inflames the problem. It turns people against the state itself and toward empty Tea Party style libertarian rhetoric. It will require nimble political footwork at a level that no-one I can currently see possesses, to defend the role of the state effectively against this pincer movement of billionaire lobbyists and populist rabble rousers. Amid all the twitter and yap of declining consumer capitalism it's far too easy to overlook the fact that the social-democratic state, rather than the "free market", is what gave us all our current freedoms, that it was the fruit of two centuries of labour struggles - and that it's being stolen from under our very noses. 

NOTE: For a deeper analysis of the ideology of Californian hi-tech corporations, see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (no relation) on The Californian Ideology

Attention Please!

Do I have your full attention? Chances are that I do until around the end of this sentence, but after that I might lose it pretty fast. My previous post here was about the physiological basis of emotion, and a natural follow up to that is to discuss “attention”, the way that emotional triggers guide our senses  toward opportunities and threats in the outside world. Attention is a function we share with most of the higher vertebrates, basically all those animals that can look you in the eye (something equivalent perhaps exists even in sessile creatures like corals, but on hugely longer time scales). At its root attention is a negative phenomenon, where the animal brain censors or filters out much of the information that pours in through eyes, ears and nose to permit concentration on just those important things that an animal might want to eat, or mate with, or which might want to eat them. To see attention at work watch a cat stalk a mouse, a sheepdog crouching in the field, or look an eagle in the eye (that’s pure attention). 

We humans tend to experience attention subjectively as something positive, a searchlight beam of intelligence that we project out onto the world and shine on its most interesting parts. Communication between humans is almost impossible without attention: if I don’t have your attention then I’m not really talking to you at all, I’m merely talking at you. In a quite deep sense your attention is who you are, a beacon that transmits your desires out onto the world and other people, which is why advertisers, performers and demagogues fight so hard to capture it. It can be stolen too: a most odious aspect of the latest communication technologies is the way they can monopolise attention to the detriment of face-to-face interaction. Who hasn’t had the experience of talking to someone who is more-or-less surreptitiously glancing at their smartphone? (The very latest development, Google Glass, enables people to apparently interact with you while simultaneously giving their attention to a website or some remote communicant. I find it rather encouraging that already within weeks of its release some bars in California have started to ban the use of Glass, and have coined the excellent insult “glassholes” for people who persist…)

The only satisfactory philosophical account of attention I know is that given by George Santayana, most rigorously developed in Scepticism and Animal Faith, a difficult and densely compressed work in which he laid out the foundations of his mature philosophical system. There he starts out from what philosophers call a “solipsism of the present moment”, where all one is allowed to know is that I am, here, now. There's a more readable account in Santayana's 1933 essay Locke and The Frontiers of Common Sense: 

"Animals that are sensitive physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt without being felt towards something – something near and potent, yet external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material? [...] But when aroused to self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at."

He goes on to assert that any sentient and mobile creature must evolve attention, because the world is too full and exposure to all of its sense data must swamp any consciousness. Animal faith, crudely-speaking, means a set of default assumptions about the nature of the world that are hard-wired by evolution – basic stuff like, things fall downwards when you drop them, things remain where they are even when you don’t look at them, some things are dead while others are live agents, etc etc etc. Such assumptions aren’t philosophical axioms, don’t need to be defended by reason, and are by no means correct in every circumstance. They permit the brain to filter out most transient phenomena and focus its spotlight of attention onto the significant, a skipping of focus that accumulates the trail of snapshots which we call memory. The “beliefs” that comprise any particular animal faith will vary between species according to the niches in which they evolved, and by definition evolution ensures that they correspond well-enough (though never perfectly) to those creatures’ actual material environment.  

Santayana’s concept of animal faith overlaps in some respects with Kant’s “categories”, and likewise finds ample support in the latest findings of neuroscience. Philosophically it was the ladder he employed to climb above the endless and fruitless debates between epistemological idealists and realists. 

It seems to me that a good theory of attention is absolutely central to any materialist theory of aesthetics. In addition to writing columns and blogs I like to take photographs (the best of which I post on Flickr). It’s tempting to think of a camera as an extension of your attention, or at least as a tool for freezing the object your attention for all time. There may be a grain of truth in this, but the brute fact remains that the camera itself doesn’t possess attention, not being a sentient animal. Admittedly the latest digital cameras incorporate ever-smarter features like autofocus, face and even expression recognition, but they come nowhere close to the attention even of a newly-hatched sparrow.

It’s not a bad thing that the camera lacks attention: that means it grabs everything, even those things that weren’t in your attention when you took the shot. Great photographers like Brassai or Cartier-Bresson make these peripheral goings-on in a street scene half of their art. Every good photographer injects a certain amount of attention into their pictures, for example by controlling depth of field to blur out a background, or by shifting the focus point off centre. And of course, in the era of Photoshop and Picasa you can scream for viewers’ attention by colouring a single object within a black-and-white image, as Spielberg did that red coat girl in Schindler’s list. Such powerful but pulpy tricks sink really fast into tackiness though. I went through a phase of playing with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography in which all the detail from three or four differently-exposed shots of the same scene are compressed down into a single image. The result is hyper-realistic, containing levels of detail that exceed what the human eye could ever capture for itself. Used with restraint this trick can sometimes induce a goose-pimply feeling that something strange is about to happen, but iron self-control is required to avoid it degenerating into over-the-top Hot Rod art (and of course advertisers now routinely employ it to enhance their wonderlands of conspicuous consumption).

Part of my reason for writing about attention just now is an excellent London Review of Books lecture by Nicholas Spice called Is Wagner bad for us? I won’t spoil things by revealing his answer, but will just concentrate on Spice’s critical approach which is based on Wagner’s acute ability to manipulate attention. As an interesting exercise he asks us to compare the first minute of Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Falstaff, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Berg’s Wozzeck with the first minutes of each opera of the Ring cycle. (Thanks to the genius of Spotify this is an experiment I could carry out even while still reading the article). Spice argues that these other composers all more or less fail to learn from Wagner’s real innovation, because their first minutes are stuffed full of multiple themes and layers of counterpoint, creating a complexity that even a professional musician can’t absorb in a live hearing:

“There’s so much going on and in such a small space that although all of the music registers somewhere in our brains, we would be hard pressed, if asked a moment later, to describe more than a few of its salient features”.

By contrast Wagner’s openings all employ simple harmonic structures that slowly build and lead you into the drama: 

“Wagner builds his music over the longer timespan through a gradual accumulation of discretely presented elements. The power and excitement of the orchestral prelude to Die Walküre, for example, is intrinsically dependent on the extreme simplicity of its ingredients [...] The simplicity of the musical components allows us to feel that we are at the controls of this infernal machine, its drive our drive – and this is the authentic Wagnerian experience.”

In other words, rather than assault our attention with a barrage of contrasting materials, Wagner gives us the illusion that it’s our own attention that’s steering the music, seducing us into a degree of empathy that can notoriously turn into out-and-out addiction.

At a far-removed edge of the cultural spectrum, modern forms of electronic dance music employ beats to a similar end (techniques that you can historically trace back to the influence of African drum musics). Extended regular rhythms can capture the attention completely, in a state similar to a trance where one’s surroundings recede into irrelevance. Note the way that dance music producers are extremely scrupulous about the precise tempo (measure in beats per minute) of their tracks, and in fact bpm is one of the main criteria used to differentiate between the bewildering number of sub-genres: Wikipedia lists over 200 of them. It’s perfectly possible that different tempos induce different resonances with heart rate or brain-wave rhythms that contribute to the pleasure of dancing. Keeping the same tempo though, however compelling, for too long is to risk boredom and so the principal skill of a good DJ is knowing exactly when to interrupt or change it.

This principle is pushed further still in the bizarre genre of dubstep, to which I’ve found myself strangely attracted recently (even though it’s wholly inappropriate to my status as an OAP). Dubstep tracks typically employ a tempo around 140bpm, but then brutally disrupt this by a device known as “the drop”, whereby the tempo suddenly slows while becoming terrifyingly loud and combined with grotesque and humorous sound-effects that draw deeply on the emotional vocabulary of bad horror movies. Your attention is grabbed in more or less the same way as when you notice a runaway cement truck approaching. Wagner used techniques that were structurally (though certainly not harmonically!) similar, for example in the prelude to Die Walküre (around 2:15). As Spice says, Wagner wanted a listener to abandon himself unresistingly to the work so that he “involuntarily assimilates even what is most alien to his nature”.

Attention can be profoundly modified by the emotions, as for example when the release of adrenaline by a fright notoriously amplifies all your senses and causes your attention to become strongly focussed. Stimulant drugs operate by mimicking the effects of such stress-released hormones, and in this sense music is a sort of drug too (and a strong one at that) operating through its effects on attention. Drugs, art, music, sport, the internet, even religion, all are competing for and capturing your attention. Do take care lest you grant it too freely.