Politicians and Pop

Generally speaking there exists an easy symbiosis between manufactured cultural icons and manufactured political icons, provided that the latter are of the garden-variety center-left sort.

When speaking of right(ish) wing politicians, however, the picture gets more complicated. Leaving aside the political preferences of Megadeath's Dave Mustaine and Kid Rock (a topic which deserves a post, if not a dissertation, in its own right), there is often a bizarre dissonance between the stated political ideals of right(ish) politicians and their musical preferences.

This topic came back into the news this week in two different places an ocean apart - the Times ran an article on the complicated relationship of Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen and David Cameron confessed his affection for a Swedish folk (?) / rock (?) / bluegrass (?) / pop (?) duo called First Aid Kit.

These two cases, I think, seem to suggest opposing explanations. In the case of Christie and Springsteen, one can see a kind of continuity between what Christie perceives as his natural base of support and the sort of so-called everyman extolled in Springsteen's music. Not everyone would make this connection, of course, but some people who care enough have made a passionate case for this reading of his music. I don't personally care - but I would point out here that the commercial machine that manufactured Bruce Springsteen is very precisely calibrated to fabricate precisely the sorts of lyrics and musics that simultaneously appeal to opposing political groups as well as opposing inclinations in one and the same listener. Our music is just like our politics - seeming unbridgable divides are mere illusions to give an appearance of depth to a single, extraordinarily shallow ideology.

Now Cameron offers a different case - there is certainly no electoral benefit to professing a preference for Swedish folk/rock/bluegrass/pop, and the duo, who "sound like a couple of troubled, leathery old weather-beaten back porch bluegrass pluckers from Kentucky", according to the Guardian, in question is unabashedly ideological - environmentalist, feminist, etc. etc. etc., a living caricature so obvious it has even made it into Parks and Recreation:

So why did this carefully curated tidbit of Cameroniana appear in the interview?

Dave has never met a principle he wasn't eager to sacrifice for the sake electoral politics or personal advancement. His new friendly Tories seem like a bunch of posers trying to show the cool kids how they should fit in too. The easy, lazy explanation is that such politicians are so little affected by the cultural products they choose (!) to consume that it makes no difference to them at all. Their miserly little souls remain so shriveled as to be utterly impervious to the psychical effects of music, how it enters, as Plato says, the innermost parts of the soul. And there is probably a bit of truth to that.

On the other hand, Swedish folk (?) / rock (?) / bluegrass (?) / pop (?) duos shouldn't be let off the hook either - ultimately they are bit players in the same economic/cultural machine designed to enrich Dave's friends. Insofar as they are useful at generating interest (which equals pageviews which equals ads which equals money), as long as anybody listens to them outside of, say, in a bar in Enskede or Stockholm, the system is winning. Left wing cultural producers are as much stooges as their right(ish) wing consumers.

But Paul Ryan and Rage Against the Machine? Maybe we can just chalk that one up to a touch of unreformed adolescent depravity and a fairly sad case of arrested development. But what can we say? Par for the course, I expect.

Simulacrum Update: Peking Installs LED Sun

The sun rises in the East, they say -- but not in the heart of the Empire du Milieu. Time was when men rose early, early being defined as "before dawn," to begin their work. They could greet the rising sun with more than a casual acknowledgment, Deus, Deus meus, ad te de luce vigilo. . . . Now Peking has given us a true Red Dawn: the dawn of the solar simulacrum. Sitivit in te anima mea . . . Was the LED sun installed in response to popular desire, the longing for light? . . . quam multipliciter tibi caro mea. . . . Or is the light only needed to enable the fleshly deeds for which one gathers in the square? In terra deserta, et invia, et inaquosa . . . Does the new sun stay in its virtual horizon? Is there no solar transit across the screen? Is the background always red? Can we not at least accept the desert and the clouds for what they are? No, we have to encapsulate the sun in bottles of vitamin D, we have to install the NatureBright SunTouch Plus Light and Ion Therapy Lamp. To work in the sun would make one a red-neck, but to visit the tanning bed is a sign of luxury. . . . sic in sancto apparui tibi, ut viderem virtutem tuam, et gloriam tuam. . . . And now the sun is only visible in the square, not from every plot of land. One can make a special pilgrimage to see the sun perpetually arrayed in the perfect moment of its dawn.

How long till one simply views the LED sun on one's own LED screen, rather than making the trek to the "real" LED?

The LED sun does not simply supply an deficiency. It indicates that the sun has already been made superfluous. Evidently, the sun knows it.

Rex vero laetabitur in Deo, laudabuntur omnes qui jurant in eo: quia obstructum est os loquentium iniqua.

Whose Politics? Which Antipolitics?

The noted political philosopher Russell Brand begins his essay on revolution by recalling the nonpolitical reason why he was willing to edit The New Statesman's issue on revolution. "I said yes," he tells us, "because it was a beautiful woman asking me." Whether it is Brand's intention to highlight the connection between beauty and political revolution is a matter for separate inquiry. The real thrust of Brand's complaint is simply that we have no politics in which to participate. There's no reason to vote, he told Paxman, and thus he violated the sacred rule that one mustn't impugn the democratic process no matter how undemocratic it may be. To do so would of course be "deeply dangerous."

Doubts about the democratic process are now routinely cited as examples of the "rising climate of anti-politics" (anti-politics being evidently not a tide). Americans want sexual permissiveness and legally sanctioned access to marijuana, FT notes, and they are concerned about the national debt. But they may not go in for the Southern-tinged populism of the Tea Party, and they're likely to prefer Rand Paul to Ted Cruz -- two largely similar senators who nevertheless project different images.

As everyone knows, only 8% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. The hand-wringing class isn't sure whether to fault Congress or the American people for such a dismal statistic: who, after all, elected the bastards? The people perhaps, but certainly "democracy" doesn't deserve the blame.

The European Union's poll numbers are hardly better, and recently registered their all-time low. But if Nigel Farage points this out as he did yesterday, he can count on UKIP's being called "indignant, angry people" and "brainless Eurosceptics." It takes a special brain to appreciate European democracy.

Our blame of the people and exculpation of democracy indicate that whatever else it may be, today's democracy is by no means rule of the people. Nor could it ever be. The rule of the people is now wholly impossible. Why?

When we ordinarily speak of "the rule of the people," we indicate that the people take themselves as their own ruling principle. It's this aspect that has become impossible today. Only non-"people," namely intellectuals and academics, assert that the people rule. The people themselves defer to other gods, to the sports-actors whose exertions enable their lassitude, to the musicians whose songs are elaborate disguises spun over a core of nothing, to the techno-prophets and their endless stream of computational anesthetics. The rule of the people is a cipher for the rule of technocrats over the ruins of ordinary life.

The reason why democracy is always on the lips of our technocrats, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other cynics, is that "the people" are the object of their social science. Politicians and capitalists alike aspire to perfect knowledge of the behavior of "the people," no longer constituted as the subject of political action but as an aggregation of very peculiar codes -- genetic, epigenetic, environmental, "political" and consumer codes. Knowledge of these codes is a different type of wisdom, not the wisdom enabling activity in ordinary life, but knowledge enabling the extraction of resources from those who are living (putatively) ordinary lives.

Who is the greater cynic, the "anti-political" citizen or the authors of The Victory Lab? Everyone knows the answer. The cynics who rule cannot tolerate cynicism in the ruled.

Every former context of political dispute is now outside the realm of politics properly so called. What the psychotic technocrats call "anti-politics" is only a vestige of human nostalgia in the posthuman world.

Trierweiler or Gayet? It doesn't matter . . .

So the British and American media is wondering why the French media are worrying about something the French are certain that only the British and the Americans would be concerned about . . . 

After all, presidential affairs are as French as blanc des noirs and mimolette, right? (Don't mind that the latter is actually a French knock off.)

The difference here, I think, is marriage. If the hapless Hollande and Trierweiler (or Royale, for that matter) were actually married, then his fling with an actress would have passed I think with nothing more than the by-now traditional "et alors?". But in reality, the only thing that gives Trierweiler any status, the only thing that makes it even possible to refer to her quite (albeit improperly) as the Première Dame is the fact that the President has decided to bed her on a presumably regular and on-going basis. Should le President decide that another bed is more amenable, she becomes nothing more than another member of the ubiquitous class of French media personalities. The status of Première Dame becomes something arbitrarily in the President's gift, to be retained or revoked as he sees fit. As a result, we are in the beyond ridiculous situation of bating our breath to see who Hollande will name as First Lady, in terms that remind me at least of the Lebron James Decision of 2010. Maybe one could convince Trierweiler's old pals at Direct8 to have a live hour-long special to broadcast the President's choice.

What this means in the long term is probably the obsolesence of the office. After all, the idea of a presidential couple is suffused with the not-quite-entirely-exorcised spirit of monarchy - it is a sacral concept still hanging on in a decidedly non-sacral political system. After all, companies are not ruled by the CEO and his consort anymore, although perhaps a century ago the position of factory-owner's wife was real and meaningful (although sometimes extremely pernicious, as Lisbeth Burger has shown).

If Hollande were married, none of this would have happened like it has. As silly as it may seem to use the word sacral in connection with as sad a sack as François Hollande, he will go down, I think, as the last French president with that particular remnant of monarchical aura. And that is a sad thing.

On a different note, that famous French attitude of unconcern about marital fidelity (even if it has never been as true as the stereotype suggests) is bound to disappear as well. You can only have affairs if you're married - it is simply silly to talk about cheating on a paramour. In its place will come a string of overlapping romantic or erotic connections, every person always inching towards their next one, perhaps held back by lingering ties of affection or familiarity. Without marriage as something real and solid, the boundary between relationships and flings is bound to grow fuzzier still. And somehow, that also seems like a sad thing too.

Western Civ and the Collapse of the Humanities - Are the Pearl-Clutchers Right?

Rebecca Schuman doesn't get it.

A case can be made against conservative hand-wringing over the fate of the traditional humanities, particularly at the fact that some conservatives can rail against the eclipse of Homer out of one side of their mouth, and out of the other support policies specifically engineered to ensure the death of whatever remains of the liberal arts. But that's not because they're wrong, so much as because they're duplicitous.

The literary canon – however flexibly you might define it, however open it has historically been to debate and reinvention – was once the heart of a whole political, artistic, cultural body, keeping it alive and self-identical over the course of time. Modernity itself is a mere senesence.

But let's get to the substance:

Mac Donald (and before her a he-swears-not-stoned David Brooks) chides the literary disciplines for losing “timelessness” in favor of contemporary critique. Timelessness? Anyone who has taught Dante’s Inferno (as I just did to my freshmen) knows that every canto contains some now-opaque reference to Dante’s personal enemies, or Pope Boniface VIII, or that timeless political party the Guelphs.In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (which I also just taught to my freshmen), much of theWife of Bath’s Prologue is devoted to rousing debate about Jovinian, whose views on marriage got him excommunicated from the Church in that timeless year that everyone remembers: 393. And do you know what play was written largely to placate his audience’s new fascination with all things Scottish? Shakespeare’s Macbeth—which, again, I just taught to my freshmen, alongside such “politically correct” work (or “masterpieces of world literature;” tomato, to-mah-to) as The Epic of Gilgamesh,The Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching.  

Does Schuman really think that the Commedia is part of the canon because of its discussion of thirteenth century Italian politics? Historical understanding can ground our reading of texts, enrich them even – that's why five hundred generations of good souls have deigned to write in the most humble of genres: the commentary. But commentaries help us appreciate even more texts that have been chosen for entirely different reasons. Not even the greatest commentary ever written will ever make Manilius required reading in Intro to Western Civ. And by the way, believe it or not, having a basic understanding of the ecclesiastical history of the fourth century was once considered a very important attainment and a really necessary part of a well-rounded education.

So why do we read Shakespeare?

Because listen. No literature, if it’s any good, is timeless. Ever. It is of its time—and, in order for students to be at all interested in reading it, it is of ours as well. That does not make it “timeless.” That makes it nuanced. For example, when my students recently read nonexplicit excerpts of the Kama Sutra, they were aghast that the text condoned “forcibly carrying” a girl away as a legitimate form of marriage. They, not I, brought up their objections in class, and a terrific discussion resulted on sexual consent in the fifth century BCE.

Um...no. British contract law is extremely nuanced – but I have yet to see anyone propose it for inclusion in the general curriculum. Nuance alone is just that . . . nuance, complexity. Fifty Shades of Grey, or so I've heard, is nuanced, and particularly so when it is read as a product of Anglo-American middle class sexual/cultural mores. Set that in a context of the decline of the print book, the rise of Amazon, and the post-Hunger Games, post-Game of Thrones, post-Girl With the Dragon Tattoo homogenization of mass literary culture, the picture because extraordinarily complex and interesting. None of that changes the fact that it is (reputedly) a terrible piece of literature.

Schuman's point is a common enough one, however – and I think it arises from this curious fact that modernists often are required to teach intro courses. Hence the only premodern literature they have ever been exposed to is the best, the timeless, the canonical. I think personally that the stories in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia are great – but Gervase is no Chaucer (be he ever so nuanced) and will never, ever be considered for a place on the Five Foot Shelf of Books. Read some Elizabethan revenge tragedy next to Macbeth – it will give you some really fascinating insight into understanding genre, and audience, and the historical context of the sixteenth century. But if you can't see how immeasurably superior Macbeth to the Spanish Tragedy, then you suffer from a complete and utter lack of taste and judgment. As a result, these modernists – always the champions of the undiscovered, the underappreciated, the marginal – assume that all premodern literature must be of the same quality. Somehow, I think their delight in the non-canonical would evaporate if they ever had to teach Valerius Flaccus, or Apollonius of Rhodes, or Marius Victor, or Orosius, or Corippus (a venerable Vandal Renaissance man), or Hrabanus Maurus, or Diego García, or Nicolas Trevet, or Thomas Kyd, or Joseph Addison.

But there is a deeper point here. The canon remains and will remain at the heart of elite education. Schools for the rich will continue to teach the traditional subjects, the traditional texts – even if their sponsors and clients are more than willing to foist 'ínnovative' and 'experimental' methods of education on the poor, the middle class, the generally non-elite. The promise of the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that this liberal training would be made available more widely, because everyone could benefit from the best that has been written and thought. Ever so predictably, our elites – more capitalist than aristocratic – are snatching away those opportunities, doing their best to ensure that higher education, except for their own children, prepares lower and middle-class children only for participation in the work-force, which in less generous moods one might call 'wage slavery'. Do you want 'a rising tide of literate poors who dare question the politics of privilege'? Then let's make them literati by giving them the education that they have been denied for reasons of money, power, and privilege. Let's actually believe that they are worth an education which treats them as something more than a potential labor unit. That I believe is the real reason we ought to defend the canon. People who peddle trendy silliness in place of the real, timeless (really timeless) solidity of the classics are collaborators with the elites who want to deny the poor and middle class a chance to have the kind of education their class has maintained as its birthright.

The Vandal Renaissance

The first of several blows to Roman North Africa came at the hands of Genseric, king of the Alans and Vandals, in 428. The Vandal Kingdom lasted barely a century, before its conquest at the hands of Justinian's famous general Belisarius.

The Vandals have the unique distinction of combining savagery - their sack of Rome in 455 gave us the common meaning of 'vandal' - and delicacy. So the historian Procopius (de bello Vandalico 2.14):

"Indeed from the time when they captured Africa, all of them made use of the baths everyday, and they enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that earth and sea provide. And they wore gold as much as possible, and wrapped in Persian clothes, which they now call silk, they spend their time in theatres and in hippodromes and in the enjoyment of other good things, and most of all in hunting. And they had dancers and actors and many things to hear and watch which happen to be musical and especially worth seeing among people. And most of them lived in gardens, which abounded in water and trees; and they held as many drinking parties as possible and all kinds of sexual activities were widely practised by them." (1)

Even their kingdom, however, was not entirely bereft of letters - a small number of gifted Latin writers and orthodox Christians flourished in North Africa in the period from 450-530. Their efforts - small and inconsequential as they may seem today - are the last flowering Christian culture in North Africa west of Egypt, and their movement has been termed by historians the 'Vandal Renaissance.'

The Vandal Renaissance meant nothing in the historical sense - its works were soon forgotten, its legacy swept away in the storm that would gather over the remnants of the Mediterranean empire of Rome and Constantinople. Their works - highly mannered, difficult even for the most accomplished readers - have never found wide acclaim, and can scarcely be called permanent constituents of the Classical Tradition.

And yet there remains something inspirational about a doomed Renaissance in a Vandal Age. In another Carthage, whose fleshpots still hiss and boil, there still might be a place for what is old and good, for antiquity and Christian revelation.

(1. Quotation from Conant, Staying Roman [Cambridge 2012], 56-7).