Ideas - Online Reading Group

I'll be missing in action for the latter months of 2008. When I return, I'd like to set up an online reading group. I envisage that this would be set up on another blog, and would possibly be a group blog. The idea would be for a group of us (and a small group is fine) to work through some meaty texts. Debate and discussion of the text would be encouraged (though not idiotic trolling unrelated to the text), individuals from different backgrounds would be welcome to contribute.

Does anybody have any interest in this sort of idea? If the answer is yes, do you have any proposals as to what it might look like?

Some areas of interest to me are philosophy, politics, history, psychoanalysis, and literature. It seems more worthwhile to me to attempt to work through difficult texts rather than straightforward ones. Having said that, novices are welcome. The aim of all this would be to create a shared online resource, and raise the level of discourse on the blogosphere up a notch or two.

Now whilst I have grand plans of returning late this year to launch into a reading group that looks at Marx's Grundrisse or Lacan's Seminar VII, for instance, I'd like to trial this idea with something much smaller, to see how it works. If it inspires a few dedicated readers in Melbourne, the discussion could also relocate off-line to somewhere suitably scholarly, like a bar. There's also a possibility that discussions could be filmed or audio-taped.

The format I have in mind is that each chapter/passage/few pages would be scheduled in advanced. One reader (probably me in the first instance) could then provide a brief bit of background and response to said chapter/few pages. Everyone else could then respond as they see fit.

Anyway, here are some suggestions for the trial run:

Politics - Maybe a short paper by Marx, or Lenin, or maybe Trotsky's paper on fascism. There are many online resources in this area, which is helpful, as it means people can access the texts for free. Hardt and Negri are also good for a laugh.

Philosophy - Badious and Zizek keep churning out interesting papers on a regular basis, though something a little less contemporary could be an option if people are interested. Some of this stuff is also available online.

Psychoanalysis - Since this area links up with the above two in many ways, as well as a plethora of other areas (sexual politics, anthropology, etc), I think it could be quite interesting if people arrive with an open mind. Some suggestions - Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, for instance, or Lacan's paper on the Mirror Stage.

Literature - I'm less inclined to delve into fiction as the blogosphere (and real world) have lots of reading groups that discuss the latest bestsellers. However, maybe as a trial, we could look at one of Nam Le's recently-published short stories, for instance.

Anyways, I'm very open to suggestions, and I encourage one and all to comment here or email me. A reading group of one is just going to be me taking notes (which I do already), and it's going to be a little sad to broadcast that over the blogosphere. So find something you like, and spare me blushes of embarrassment.

Until then, I'm off to Sydney in a couple of days to spread subversion for a short while. I might check out that bookshop belonging to that Gould chap. I hope to hear from you all in the near-future.

A Salvo Against Cruise-Missile 'Liberals'

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in light of 9/11 and the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, a number of self-identified leftists or liberals underwent a period of colonoscopic self-examination. Many emerged from the process as supporters of US, British, and, more locally, Australian imperialism. Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Pamela Bone, the Eustonites - collectively these people are known as the 'Decent Left'.

A rather indecent comrade, who happens to be arguably the best solo blogger on the intertubes, has just published a book looking at this very subject:





It's published by the excellent Verso, who also provide a good deal of other indecent stuff, such as anti-imperialist tomes, and exegeses on Lacan. Pre-order the book, comrades, and tell your Decent friends to return to their colonoscopic self-examination!

In the meantime, if you'd like a shorter rebuttal of Decentism, you could do much worse than this hilarious rejoinder.

Hang the Intellectuals

The weekend rag had an opinion piece by Chris Middendorp, asking why the works of Australia's greatest novelist, Patrick White, were more or less ignored by mainstream Australia. Middendorp attributes this phenomenon to 'cultural cringe'.

Clearly, Australians have much to cringe about, but most of our cringeworthy objects these days are not cultural, but political. We might ask some other questions about why a writer such as White is ignored, and ignored precisely by our good nationalists in the media.

To be sure, White is a 'difficult' writer, but no more so than any number of other modernists. We should find it striking that this era of cultural whitewashing, where Australia's racism is routinely re-branded as patriotism (or, in the cases of racism directed at Aborigines, as a 'goodwill' intervention), is precisely the era where Australians of international significance among the intelligentsia are either ignored (Patrick White), maligned (Germaine Greer) or co-opted (I'll refrain from citing examples for this last category).

It is no coincidence, of course, that during the past 10 years of Howard's rule, and subsequent cultural warfare, intellectuals have been a source of considerable angst to conservatives. It is also no coincidence that Patrick White, an avowed Whitlamite, homosexual, and Republican, is one such intellectual. As a Nobel Laureate, he is too well-regarded to be susceptible to an Andrew Bolt or Christopher Pearson smear-piece (though White's biographer is not so fortunate). Nonetheless, White is simply sidestepped, while the NewsCorp hacks and Liberal politicians (such as George Brandis, last week) aim at smaller targets.

It should be clear by now that, after years of 'intellectual' or 'elite' being used as terms of abuse, that conservative politicians, and a pliant media, have attempted, as much as possible, to push an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural agenda, except where the latter targets are sufficiently fairy floss-like to be considered no threat to the 'evil, Howard-hating elites' narrative.

In this vein, News Ltd. Political Hack-in-Chief Paul Kelly appeared on last Friday's Lateline, in an attempt to debate LaTrobe University historian Robert Manne. The debate topic revolved around the culture wars, and a recent essay by Kelly purporting to demonstrate that Australia has cultivated a clique of 'public intellectuals' concerned solely with Howard-hating polemic, who ignore the Liberal Governments policy 'success'.

Never mind that this 'success' is far from agreed-upon. Sure, the economy has not collapsed, and has been very generous (for some Australians only - but this topic can wait for another post). On every other front, however, there has been policy failure.

Good quality, affordable healthcare and education has become more difficult to obtain. Workers' long-held rights have been abolished. The sentiments of race-rioters are more or less echoed, repeatedly, by our Governing politicians.

Robert Manne, a long-time conservative who remains conservative (though not slavishly in awe of the Howard Government) made these points to Kelly, and noted that he, Raymond Gaita, David Marr, and Julian Burnside are all 'elites' who are systematically demonised by the News Ltd crew. Manne took Kelly to task successfully:

I don't dispute there is a large group of us who think the Howard
Government has on balance done a lot of harm to Australia in the area of
culture, not the economy, but there are only three people mentioned. I want to
say just one thing about that.

The three people mentioned are very distinguished
people, not second rate in any way. Paul might disagree with them, might think
they are too moralistic about Howard and so on. One has written a superb
biography of Patrick White, David Marr. The other, Raymond Gaita, is probably
the best known philosopher of Australia except for Peter Singer, maybe. And
Julian Burnside is not a public intellectual so much as a humane and extremely
fine barrister who's had major success.

I think the category - the three people
included, if he thinks they're second rate, he should look to the cast of
journalists in Australia. I think there is a real argument and I think it's a
left-right argument, as you said. And I think it's about those intellectuals
like myself and like Ray Gaita and like David Marr and many others like Julian,
who think the Howard Government in many ways has done great damage to this
country and the question of how angry we should be or what the right moral
temper is for all of that is an important and right issue. If I could start by
something. It we look at this week, we've had, for example, a defamatory attack
on a group of academics who happen to disagree with what the Government would
like us to believe on WorkChoices. I don't know what Paul thinks about this, but
we've had an attack on the entire character of a continent - Africans. I feel
really upset about it and I don't think sort of worldly calm, as Paul seems to
think, is the right response to an attack on an entire group of people. I think
it is racism, I have to say.

And therein is revealed the intellectual bankruptcy of present-day conservatism. Preoccupied with idiotic left-right cultural flaming, they cannot assert any coherent, positive position, or even identify who 'the left' actually are. For instance, as Manne correctly noted, Kelly's targets are not rabid socialists.

For instance, Gaita is a signed-up member of the execrable Euston crowd. Burnside is concerned primarily with human rights and due legal process, and is not a polemicist. Marr is a polemicist, but of a self-described 'soft-left' variety. Whilst his criticisms of the Howard Government are frequent, and articulate, they are hardly militant.

The stupidity continued today in the Government Gazette when the far-right News Ltd hack, and board member of 'our' ABC, Imre Salusinszky, opined that the 'intellectuals have gone too far'.

Last week, the Government's 'avuncular' Minister for Serfdom, Joe Hockey, attacked an academic report that demonstrated that the Government's Workchoices legislation left workers worse off. Always more 'idiot' than 'savant', Salusinszky continued Hockey's anti-intellectual smearing by way of Murdoch's megaphone:

A quick scan, using the internet, of research centres at universities
reveals that many are structured around the "softie Left" world view that former
Media Watch host David Marr memorably nominated as the primary qualification for
entry into Australian journalism.

One can accept the above statement as true, provided one excludes the actual content of 90% of what passes for Australian 'journalism'. Only one newspaper in the country is even vaguely to the 'left', and there is no television program that could be considered particularly progressive.

Salusinszky targets that author of the industrial relations study in particular, with this obtuse broadside:

And perhaps there is no reason to be concerned that, in the era during
which the mainstream political class has come to accept the logic of the market,
an academic paid to conduct research into the Australian labour market still
describes himself as a socialist.

This statement demonstrates Salusinszky's remove from the 'mainstream', as well as his sycophantic sloganeering. Who in 'mainstream' Australia has come to accept 'the logic' of the market, other than the HR Nicholls society and a few fundamentalists? Not the many Australians who opposed the sale of Telstra, and who oppose the increasing privatisation of every aspect of society. Not the majority of Australians who despise the Government's supposed 'deregulation' of industrial relations laws. Not the farmers, who are slated to receive significant subsidies or generous retirement handouts from the Government, in order to shore up votes in rural electorates. Imre's gripe, that a labour-market researcher describes himself as 'socialist', is likewise misguided. The Australian Labor Party still describes itself as 'socialist' (with the necessary qualifiers), and remains Australia's oldest, and single-most popular party.

Salusinzsky's most comical moment, however, comes at the end of his piece, where he cites is colleague and fellow-culture warrior, Paul Kelly:

"A healthy democracy will see a healthy gulf between its politicians and
its intellectuals. But this gulf in Australia is a chasm that demands serious
attention."

That the GG could even try to publish such material, without irony, and not intended as satire, suggests that some grave intellectual deficiencies exist either among Murdoch's staff, or his readers. That, or we need to hang a few 'intellectuals'.

Blindness

The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leaving their cars at the ready, advancing, retreating like nervous horses that can sense the whiplash about to be inflicted. The pedestrians have just finished crossing but the sign allowing the cars to go will be delayed for some seconds, some people maintain that this delay, while apparently so insignificant, has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious causes of traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term.

The green light came on at last, the cars moved off briskly, but then it became clear that not all of them were equally quick off the mark. The car at the head of the middle lane has stopped, there must be some mechanical fault, a loose accelerator pedal, the gear lever that has stuck, a problem with the suspension, jammed brakes, a breakdown in the electric circuit, unless he has simply run out of petrol, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened. The next group of pedestrians to gather at the crossing see the driver of the stationary car wave his arms behind the windscreen, while the cars behind him frantically sound their horns. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then to the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone manages to open the door, I am blind.

Excerpt from Blindness, by Portuguese Nobel Laureate, José Saramago - and perhaps the best opening lines of what is perhaps his best novel.

Engage in a bit of self-harm.

This is old news, but still worth a cheap laugh or two.



A magazine called, rather touchingly, Human Events, (described by Wiki as a 'weekly conservative magazine'), regularly puts out a series of 'Top Ten' lists, written with the US far-right agenda firmly in mind.



Several of them are chuckle-worthy, but one that I found quite revealing of a particular mindset was entitled 'Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries'. Let's see if we can catch a glimpse of America's finest 'conservative' reasoning at work - the list of modern literature's most diabolical creations is as follows:



1. The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels)
This one is no surprise. After all, everybody knows that it's only right-wing evangelical Christians who are the revolutionary class these days. They describe Engels as 'the original limousine leftist'. I guess these days, we Australian would simply call him a 'latte leftist', or 'chardonnay socialist'. Topping the list by a long way, this little book:

(E)nvisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and
oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and
nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil
Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

Actually, the 'Evil Empire' didn't, but that's history for you.

2. Mein Kampf (Hitler)
I haven't actually read this one, in fairness, and I doubt it has anything of value in it. I doubt history would have altered one iota had Hitler not published, given that I've heard it described as 'turgid' and 'vacuous'. Still, budding Nazis used to hand copies of this out as wedding gifts (what happened to coffee makers?), and I'd be surprised if it wasn't filled with all kinds of racist, anti-democratic, anti-leftist ranting. One for the Alan Jones set, I suppose.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
As the fundies put it:

Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western
leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “It is the task of the
people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression
perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

Billions? China's a populous place, but I hope you're not exaggerating there, guys. And so what if Mao spoke out against 'US imperialism'? It obviously didn't work.

4. The Kinsey Report
From a psychoanalytic perspective, I can't think of anything worse than sitting down to read some 'sexologists' bloated musings on sexual behaviour, backed up by half-arsed statisticising. Still, calling it harmful is a bit of a stretch. The Righteous explain the source of their concern:

“Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by
saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused
of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported
last year when a movie on Kinsey was released.

Apart from the fact that the newspaper report about the book, rather than the book itself, is examined by the rightards, I think the above quote tells us that there's more wrong with America's 1940s laws than with Kinsey's report.

5. Democracy and Education (Dewey)
Think of evil, and I'm guessing that for most people, philosopher and education reformer John Dewey isn't the first name that comes to mind. Then again, Human Events tells us that 'He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes'. Yep, those damned Humanists, with their cross-burnings, and wars and...I mean, with their manifestos, and books, and with the signings, and such.

His views had great influence on the direction of American
education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton
generation.

Gasp! Not Clinton! The semi-competent president who was marginally less conservative than Reagan and the Bushes! If only he had offered Lewinsky a cigar instead of a harmful book...

6. Das Kapital (Marx)
Very impressive Karl - you've got two gongs already. If that's not a glowing reference, I don't know what is. But isn't Das Kapital a bit too wordy and philosophical to be truly harmful? Not according to Human Events, because this book is about:

portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society
in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the
cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

This is obviously false, when capitalism is really about fairness and bunny rabbits, and capitalists are generous, and Kris Kringle-like. Just ask free-market Colombia, or capitalist paradise Djibouti.

Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian
revolution.

Er, not in any of the four volumes of Das Kapital, he didn't.

He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society
based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over
envy and seek to emulate.

Ha ha ha! Great satire, guys!

7. The Feminine Mystique (Friedan)
Here, feminism rears its ugly, equality-demanding head. Our brilliant authors at Human Events manage, in a showcase of brevity and wit, to sum up Friedan's life work:

Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but
left-wing journalism.

Enough said.


8. The Course of Positive Philosophy (Comte)
We've had feminists, communists, and humanists, so, for the sake of completeness, we needed at least on French philosopher on the list. Unfortunately, these guys seemed to have picked the one French philosopher unlikely to be read by anybody outside of a Sorbonne philosophy course, with a major in obscurantism.

Comte's shtick ('Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal') was to abandon organised religion in favour of science. This was only mildly racy in 19th Century France, but is apparently harmful to 21st Century America, because whilst Comte espoused universal principles of reason:

He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond
“theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through
“metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on
abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man
alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to
be.

Ah, those pesky metaphysicians, wasting their time on 'abstract assertions' of human rights 'without a God'. No wonder the UN doesn't work!

For the record, I think that positivism is crap. Still, it looks pretty smart when compared to 'Intelligent Design'.

9. Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
One of my favourites, the authors offer little in the way of reasons to consider Nietzsche 'harmful', except for this quote from the text:

“Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the
strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms,
incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote.

Nietzsche is possibly quite wrong here, and could have been corrected if 'life' was replaced with 'consumer capitalism'...The authors point out, correctly, that the Nazis were fans of Nietzsche. They failed to point out that the Nazis could only produce a sympathetic reading of Nietzsche by cherry-picking through his quotes in a grotesquely self-serving manner, and omitting vast amounts of his work. A bit like the way a conservative 'reads' the Bible: Christ apparently was, after all, a homophobe, who, um, drank little wine, and who may not really have saved the alleged adulteress from death by stoning.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes)
One of the more ghastly of the evil tomes, this one advocates, (wait for it!), government intervention in the economy! Obviously, only the most reckless of parents would allow their innocent children to read something like this.

A number of other books got 'honourable mentions' from the conservatives. Here is a round up of the highlights:

What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin: What! They don't like Lenin...

Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno: He wasn't that big on capitalism. Or authoritarians.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill: The title is reason enough to avoid this subversive trash.

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: Down with biology.

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault: How is this harmful? He's French; case closed.

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader: He's a consumer advocate, and not a Republican. Pure villainy and scum, in other words.

Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: More feminist claptrap. Every fundie knows that women are not the second sex, but the third. After mules.

Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci: God only knows what a communist would get up to in prison.


Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: You stand up for the third world, you deserve to be called harmful.

Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud: Whoops, with all the Marx, Nietzsche, and now Freud, I've been triple-harmed. But let's face it, the Three Essays on Sexuality are much saucier.

The Greening of America by Charles Reich: A dirty hippie. Decadent society. If books of this sort continue, we will inevitably see a social revolution, like women smoking unaccompanied at the opera. Or Woodstock.

Descent of Man by Charles Darwin: That's two for Darwin. Sure, the guy was a big Anglican. But we all know, the only 'descent' in Darwin's work was his descent into immorality and science.

That's the list done - I bet their top ten 'most helpful' books would make for an enlightening read...But that's enough for conservatives on literature - time for a shower.

When theme parks go literary...

According to the SMH (and Reuters), somebody in the south of England is planning to open up a theme park based on the works of Charles Dickens:

"We are not Disneyfying Dickens," insists manager Ross Hutchins as he dons hard
hat and fluorescent jacket to tour the site, a hive of activity as the Fagin's
den playground and Newgate Prison's grimy walls are given their finishing
touches.

In addition to offering boat rides through a 'dank and dirty London', the theme park may also have characters like the Artful Dodger and Uriah Heep wandering around, perhaps directing visitors to 'Ye Olde Curiosity Gift Shop'.

Whilst the New York Times and some other newspapers were dismissive of the idea, it got me thinking about the myriad of possibilities for other literary theme parks.

What about Dostoevsky World, where tourists get to re-enact murders, and hang out with Russian prostitutes on a makeshift Nevsky Pier?

Or Freud World, where tourists wander through exhibits depicting Oedipus, Hamlet, et cetera, whilst bearded Austrians waving cigars pop up and offer provocative interpretations?

Maybe William Burroughs World, where the kiosks offer heroin in addition to food, and every day at 1pm sharp, the Naked Lunch amphitheatre is the stage for a drug-fuelled sex pantomime?

Or perhaps Kafka World, where all of the rollercoasters stop halfway into the ride. When visitors attempt to get a pass out, they are continually told that they are at the wrong information booth, and that they need to try the help desk on the pther side of the theme park, until they collapse in exhaustion.

Actually, I think I've been to Kafka World. They call it the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Melbourne.