Ken For Second Choice! [UPDATE: And the Thames Wept...]

Okay, I know that every Londoner in the world is already bored to tears with this, and that nobody else much gives a damn. But what the hell… Assuming Lord Snooty doesn’t actually win a majority in first preference votes (which would be horrifying, but just surely not), the correct way to vote in the mayoral election is:

1) Whoever you actually want to win that isn’t Boris
2) Ken

In this scenario, your first vote is basically meaningless

so there’s not much point discussing it

but the second preference counts.  If your first preference is, say, Lindsey German, don’t go putting no Sian Berry as second choice.  Or vice versa.

A lunchtime poll of increasingly irritated colleagues reveals one vote for first Paddick, then Berry (this is what I’m talking about – don’t do that), and five people who couldn’t care less about the fucking London elections.  But the Boris fans must be out there somewhere – he’s on 46% (according to YouGov).  If he nudges past 50%, of course, the Ken-for-second-choice strategy may seem pretty misguided in hindsight.  (I know nothing about teh matehmatics, but I don’t see how this can be right).  Still, I think we have the luxury of downgrading our anti-Tory votes to second tier status…

There’s some sort of London Assembly up for grabs, too, I gather.

[UPDATE: Oh Jesus fucking Christ. I don’t have the heart to look at the results properly (plus my computer keeps crashing). But this is a fucking nightmare.

In London: the first past the post constituencies were all held by the incumbent party, except for Brent and Harrow, which Labour gained from Tory arseholes. Left List results on the Socialist Worker site. Interesting (to geeky yet ignorant me) that the incredibly annoying division of the socialist vote in Greenwich and Lewisham resulted in Left List’s Jennifer Jones getting 2,045 to Socialist Alternative’s Chris Flood’s 1,587 (even though Flood’s a longstanding councillor, and Jones is a student…) But that’s still less than two and a half per cent of the vote between them; so not unimprovable.

I can’t find the results for the eleven Assembly seats elected by PR – possibly they haven’t been declared yet – but it seems unlikely they’ll bring good news. More to the point, though, Johnson is now our mayor for four years. Boris Johnson. [He lost first name status when he stopped being a figure of fun and started being a source of pain.] Jesus Fuck. Jesus Fuck. I suppose the best to hope for is that he’ll make such a complete balls-up of it that he’ll materially damage the Conservatives nationwide. But that’s really not a scenario we ought to be hoping for.

Furthermore: this is the worst local election result for Labour for forty years. That’s forty years. We’re headed for a landslide Tory victory at the next general election. I don’t care how much you hate them: politicians are not ‘all the same’. Yes, New Labour are neoliberal and authoritarian in their very soul; but since the choice is, in fact, between New Labour and the Tories, this is terrible terrible news…

Logging back online to post this I find that the BNP have won their first London Assembly seat. It’s just a horror story…]

[On the Mayoral vote, Berry, who has been all over every newspaper in the country, got 3.15%. Fucking Barnbrook, of the fucking BNP, got 2.84%. This is horrifying. German got 0.68%.] [It's just a rout - the end of New Labour; but also terrible for the far left, whose support has fallen or stagnated while the BNP have picked up votes...]

Metaphor of Equivalence

Borges’ story ‘The Zahir’ ends with his narrator’s thoughts entirely occupied by the image of a coin – and with the ambition to “wear it away”, through thought. This obsession is a metaphor, arguably, for our obsession with money. But a coin seems to give itself better than the other figures of the Zahir to the total domination of consciousness. “The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of all the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable… any coin… is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures.” The function of a coin derives from its power of symbolism, circulation, and equivalence – because, in the system of circulation and equivalence that is a capitalist economy, a coin can in principle be substituted for or symbolise anything that falls within that economy. Thus a coin seems uniquely well placed to usurp consciousness – provided we understand consciousness as the ability to represent the world.

The coin as infinitely applicable, infinitely substitutable, infinitely exchangeable symbol; the coin as the material instantiation of an abstract power of equivalence. The coin is a material object that functions like thought. And thus the coin can take the place of thought – or, rather, the coin can make thought subordinate to it. “It is not as though the Zahir were made of glass, since one side is not superimposed upon the other” – the coin is not a medium through which the objects of possible substitution are perceived – “rather, it is though the vision were itself spherical, with the Zahir rampant at the center.” Once a concrete instantiation of absolute substitutability has been established, this instantiation becomes the still centre to which all else must be referred. It is the transcendental, empirical, final referent – because it can in turn refer to anything at all.

We are now used to thinking the necessary materiality of thought. Since Derrida – and Wittgenstein – we know that the ideality of thought always depends on the materiality of the signs and symbols that enable thought. Nonetheless – this materiality has more often than not been understood as the materiality of language – the materiality of words, of text; perhaps, for Wittgenstein, of social practices. But not the materiality of a coin, not “a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letters N T and the number 2…”

At crucial moments in Derrida’s work (I’m focussing on Derrida; we’ll get to Wittgenstein, perhaps, eventually, at which point everything, I hope, will change) the coin looms large; the coin (the infinite substitutions of capitalist economies) seems to dominate the language with which Derrida articulates his thought of infinite substitutability as language.

Near the start of ‘White Mythologies’, his essay on metaphor, Derrida quotes from Anatole France’s ‘The Garden of Epicurus’. “Polyphilos:… I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like… knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins to the grindstone to efface the exergue, the value and the head. When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: ‘These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely.’ They are right in speaking thus. By this needy knife-grinder’s activity words are changed from a physical to a metaphysical acceptation. It is obvious what they lose in the process; what they gain by it is not so immediately apparent.” (quoted in ‘Margins of Philosophy’, p. 210)

Coin as metaphor for language. Coin as metaphor for metaphor. The sensuous meaning of language is rubbed away, to produce abstraction –abstraction conceals a hidden sensuousness.

But it seems strange of France’s Polyphilos to use this metaphor for metaphor. The coin is (of course) already an abstraction, a materially instantiated abstraction – a ‘sensuous non-sensuous’, to use the language of ‘Capital’ (or of Hegel; or, I’m told, of Goethe’s Mephistopheles). To rub away at the coin to make it abstract – to efface the head – is to remove its connection to the abstract (to the head). A coin without inscription loses its value as a coin. And so Polyphilos’s satire, that ridicules metaphysicians for effacing the real meaning of the words they use – a real meaning that is sensual, tangible, non-abstract, metaphoric; this ridicule is rerouted by the metaphor Polyphilos uses to describe metaphor – this metaphor makes metaphor already abstract, makes sensuousness already abstract. And it does so through the power of the coin.

Derrida of course critiques Polyphilos (or Anatole France) in ‘White Mythology’. But he does so while also deploying a metaphorics of the coin – of capital and surplus value.

“In signifying the metaphorical process, the paradigms of coin, of metal, silver and gold, have imposed themselves with remarkable insistence… Inscription on coinage is most often the intersection, the scene of the exchange between the linguistic and the economic. The two types of signifier supplement each other in the problematic of fetishism…” (p. 216). But this “supplement”, which imposes itself upon us, also disrupts the metaphorical strategy of Derrida’s work. For though Derrida is not a ‘linguistic philosopher’, his deconstructions of the philosophical canon focus on the treatment of the sign; and to extend the features of the sign to all aspects of the world is one of the basic manoeuvres by which Derrida aims to undermine philosophies of presence, or of ‘the proper’.

Yet this extension of the philosophy of the sign to the whole of life is also the question of the relation between philosophy and non-philosophy. And, as Derrida tells us in the passage I’ve just quoted, “the analogy within language finds itself represented by an analogy between language and something other than itself… [T]hat which seems to ‘represent’, to figure, is also that which opens the wider space of a discourse on figuration…” If it is “the paradigms of coin” that have “imposed themselves with remarkable insistence” when treating this analogy between language and non-language, might this not tell us something about the sources of Derrida’s own work – and about his strategy of extending or totalising the linguistic? For the metaphor of metaphor, the literary or philosophical space that precedes and makes possible any discourse on equivalence of non-equivalents, here seems to be the coin – or, more generally, the economic.

Derrida remains, in many ways, a transcendental philosopher, searching for the conditions of any discourse of empiricism. Yet if Derrida’s search for quasi-transcendentals leads him again and again into the realm of economic language (as I think it does), is it not legitimate to search in turn for the empirical conditions – the empirical sources – of the figures he deploys. How can coin, usury, capital be any kind of quasi-transcendental? Are these not in the first place material and social phenomena of our real world, our world of capitalist exchange and exploitation? To place Derrida’s discourse on the sign within a discourse on the economy; and then to place that in turn within the changes and self-understandings of capitalist society – this would be to historicise deconstruction to a degree that Derrida himself doesn’t seem to envisage.

And let me point you all again to Le Colonel Chabert, who seems to be doing that very thing as we speak…

More on Derrida and Marx

I’m a little bit tired at the moment, so no proper post just yet. But for anyone interested in Derrida and Marx, let me put up a pointer to Le Colonel Chabert, who has recently started a Marx-oriented critique of Derrida.

From the conclusion of the outstanding first post:

“It is against the project (of explanation, critique and action) expressed and referred to here in the Grundrisse that Derrida’s intellectual product most consistently militated, undertaking a defence of liberalism’s doctrine of sacred property in the most mystical and mystifying possible manner, discovering private property, and indeed, eventually, capital specifically, to be not only the natural law of human relations but the the very primal matter-energy of which the phenomenal world is made, the force that is found spectrally filling the void from which being and presence have always already absconded (to be forever pursued, their imaginary loss forever mourned), the foundation of the universe itself, the creator and all creatures, eternal, indestructible.”

But read the post in full.

Behind the Coin

In Borges’ fantasy story ‘The Zahir’, a snobbish lovesick narrator, ‘Borges’, becomes monomaniacally obsessed with the image of a coin. The coin, he tells us, is ‘the Zahir’.

“In Arabic, ‘zahir’ means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for ‘beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.” There can only be one Zahir, Borges tells us: “the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be a Zaheer at the same time, since a single one is capable of entrancing multitudes.”

At the story’s end, ‘Borges’ faces the certain knowledge that he will soon be unable to think of anything except the image of the Zahir, “a common twenty-centavo coin…”

“In the waste and empty hours of the night I am still able to walk through the streets. Dawn often surprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about that passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the veil… I long to travel that path. Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir endlessly, I can manage to wear it away; perhaps behind the coin is God.”

~~~

In Borges’ story the aspect or nature of the Zahir changes with the changes of history (“In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful…”) and it is of course no accident that Borges chooses a coin as his and our time’s monomaniacal obsession. What I want to do over the next few weeks or months is follow some of the themes touched on in this story.

To get more specific, and tedious: we’re about to descend into a rather deep ‘Specters of Marx’-shaped hole. I’m going to be trying to understand some of the implications of Derrida’s take on commodity fetishism – and how it relates to the ‘messianicity without messianism’ that Derrida offers, in ‘Specters’, as a source of progressive hope in the face of the horrifying contemporary dominance of neo-liberal capitalist ideology. My claim, I think, is going to be this: Derrida’s ‘weak messianicity’ is not an alternative to neoliberal hegemony, but is, rather, one of its expressions. The religious themes that circulate (“like capital, or poverty”) behind Derrida’s deployment of the theme of messianicity can be connected to the hidden theological or onto-theological self-justifications of capitalist economics. For capitalism (it’s embarrassingly cliched and glib to say) is a religion without God – a religion where God, or the emotional and social forces that produce Him, inhabits the coin. So we’ll start from the Zahir, and ask, among other, better, questions: what lies behind the coin (if not God)?

Oh For Fuck’s Sake (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘Fooled By Randomness’)

[A ranting post very much not worth your time, I’m afraid.]

I’m proud to say that I’ve been writing a deconstructionist-inclined blog for almost a year now, and have never once engaging in a bitter assault on the popular detractors of continental theory. You’ll notice that no interminable post excoriating Sokal and Bricmont has yet appeared. I am a saint.

On the other hand, I’ve just started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller ‘Fooled By Randomness’. (In a no doubt misguided attempt to dip my toe into the glibber end of popular accounts of probability theory; I guess I should buckle down and read some real books.) As soon as I figured out the tone, I guessed that an ignorant and philistine invocation of Derrida as charlatan wouldn’t be far away. And, sure enough, on page seven (so soon!) we get an approving reference to a Ph.D. thesis in philosophy. “But not the Derrida continental style of incomprehensible philosophy (that is, incomprehensible to anyone outside of their ranks, like myself).” I gritted my teeth and continued. (Still no ranting blog post! I have the patience of Job!) But then on pages 72-3 we get this – and I boot up my computer.

“Increasingly, a distinction is being made between the scientific intellectual and the literary intellectual – culminating with what is called the ‘science wars’, plotting factions of literate nonscientists against literate scientists. The distinction between the two approaches originated in Vienna in the 1930s, with a collection of physicists who decided that the large gains in science were becoming significant enough to make claims on the field known to belong to the humanities… The Vienna Circle was at the origin of the development of the ideas of Popper, Wittgenstein (in his later phase), Carnap, and flocks of others.”

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean – don’t you think the distinction between the scientific intellectual and the literary intellectual might have had some force before 1930s Vienna? Can the Vienna Circle be entirely accurately described as “a collection of physicists”? Does the later phase of Wittgenstein really originate there (even as a reaction against it)? Be all that as it may; next we get this:

“I suggest reading the hilarious Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal [it’s just inevitable, this reference; the pages might as well be blank; we can fill them in ourselves]… (I was laughing so loudly and so frequently while reading it on a plane that other passengers kept whispering things about me) [Probably ‘what an arsehole’]… Science is method and rigour; it can be identified in the simplest of prose writing. For instance, what struck me while reading Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene is that, although the text does not exhibit a single equation, it seems as if it were translated from the language of mathematics.”

Superficial detractors of continental theory often invoke Dawkins as the exemplar of scientific rationality. Don’t get me started on him. (In a word, ‘The Selfish Gene’ is precisely not translated from the language of mathematics, because half the point of the thing is to develop a metaphor – a metaphor, of the ‘selfishness’ of the gene, which may or may not be helpful (and there’s a whole endless debate to be had about the validity of ascribing intentional states to apparently mindless objects, or to parts of/systems within organisms), but that only works as metaphor. Which isn’t to say that Dawkins doesn’t have strictly ‘scientific’ claims to make – but Dawkins himself is perfectly clear (in, for instance, the first chapter of ‘The Extended Phenotype‘) that ‘a change of aspect’, rather than a scientific hypothesis, is the main thing he hopes to advance in his popular science writing.) Anyway.

“[T]here is another, far more entertaining way to make the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one. Rhetoric can be constructed randomly, but not genuine scientific knowledge.”

If I understand him right, Taleb means, by “Monte Carlo generator”, a computer program that is capable of churning out vast numbers of imaginary events, according to a set of predetermined rules. I can’t pretend to understand [which is why I'm reading this stuff, after all] – with my knowledge of computers, it’s amazing this blog is still in one piece. But (in a fairly superficial way) what Taleb’s saying here is surely wrong. A ‘Monte Carlo generator’ can construct scientific knowledge – as Taleb has already told us.

“It is a fact that ‘true’ mathematicians do not like Monte Carlo methods. They believe that they rob us of the finesse and elegance of mathematics. They call it ‘brute force’. For we can replace a large portion of mathematical knowledge with a Monte Carlo simulator (and other computational tricks). For instance, someone with no formal knowledge of geometry can compute the mysterious, almost mystical, Pi.” (p. 47) If existing mathematical knowledge can be replicated in this way, I find it hard to believe that new mathematical – or scientific – knowledge can’t also be so produced. [Okay, I just did my googling. Wikipedia informs me that in mathematics "[t]he method is useful for obtaining numerical solutions to problems which are too complicated to solve analytically.” I need to learn about this sort of thing.] At any rate, the ability of ‘Monte Carlo generators’ to supply Taleb with knowledge and understanding seems to be the main reason he likes them so much.

Anyway. Next we get this:

“This is the application of Turing’s Test of artificial intelligence, except in reverse. What is the Turing test? [We get a description. Taleb continues:] The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing it was written by a human. Can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida entirely randomly?”

Well – let’s charitably put down to ‘humorous’ license Taleb’s ‘reversal’ of the Turing test. And lets ignore the fact that the so called ‘random’ production of any text is random only within incredibly limited bounds – most of the game’s effectiveness depends on the non-randomly selected phrases and rules for the combination of phrases that whatever program Taleb’s describing would consist in. (Just as Taleb’s method of ‘randomly’ computing the value of Pi isn’t random at all except in one of the program’s particular functions.) All that said – the answer to Taleb’s last question is: obviously yes. Of course you can ‘randomly’ produce a piece of text that can be mistaken for Derrida – by people who know fuck all about Derrida. In fact, I’d go further – if the program that produces phrases is sufficiently intelligently set up, I daresay I could be fooled by – or at least not confident in my judgement of the provenance of – some phrase or short sequence of phrases. At some point that would collapse – you’re not going to be able to generate an intelligible essay, or even a longish piece of text, using a ‘random’ method. (And if you can, maybe you should apply for that Turing Test prize money.) But I have no idea what Taleb thinks he’s demonstrating here.

“[T]here are Monte Carlo generators designed to structure such texts and write entire papers. Fed with ‘postmodernist’ texts, they can randomize phrases under a method called recursive grammar, and produce grammatically sound but entirely meaningless sentences that sound like Jacques Derrida, Camille Paglia, and such a crowd. Owing to the fuzziness of his thought, the literary intellectual can be fooled by randomness.”

What bullshit. What copper-plated, cast-iron, dug from a farmer’s prize bull’s ditch of prize bullshit bullshit. According to ‘Fortune’ magazine (I know, I shouldn’t expect much, why did I even buy the fucking thing?) ‘Fooled by Randomness’ is “One of the smartest books of all time.” Well, not so much. Not if it has stuff that even vaguely resembles this in it. Good lord. Why do people take this sort of thing seriously? What’s going on?

I was planning to write more, but I think I’ve reached a pitch of intemperance that requires a hasty close. Don’t buy ‘Fooled by Randomness’. I’ve got it here now, and I’m wondering whether to try to finish it or burn it. I guess I should toss a coin.

[Apologies for this nonsense post. Unusually, I have too much time on my hands today.]

If. Derrida.

It’s pretty clear that you can’t get any kind of a grasp of economics without understanding probability – the theory & philosophy of probability. I don’t. This post is just a place marker; a note to self that’ll shame me if I don’t spend time on probability.

Initial thoughts: Derridean that I am, I’m interested in the function of signs. Derrida sees (IMO) the quest of philosophy as the quest to abolish the sign – or, rather, the quest to abolish the distance between a sign and its object. This is also, of course, the quest to abolish uncertainty – because uncertainty is the difference between our representations of the world and the world itself.

Epistemology, then, is the attempt to understand the connection between signs and their objects; and, it’s often thought, a successful epistemology is one that guarantees a certain form of connection. Derrida works at undermining such guarantees – or at undermining the guarantees’ unassailability. This is what leads to the view of Derrida as a sceptic – a philosopher who also undermines any connection between our view of the world and the world as it really is.

This view of Derrida is based, however, on a vision of epistemology that Derrida’s thought also works to undermine. For seeing epistemology as an attempt to understand the link between representations and things in themselves presupposes an unmediated, guaranteed relationship between the subject of knowledge and the subject’s representations. This is the familiar flaw of much epistemology – at least the kind I was taught when learning analytic philosophy. It produces such wacky ideas as ‘qualia’. And an infinite regress always opens up: aren’t representations themselves a certain kind of thing-in-itself? The project of much phenomenological empiricism seems to be to create a new, subjective object of knowledge, that isn’t separated from us by a dark glass; an object we can possess as absolutely our own.

But, of course, a ‘subjective’ object is vulnerable to the same sceptical arguments as an ‘objective’ object. What is the subject’s relation to qualia? And if this is a relation of any kind, can’t that relation in principle also be broken, just as the relation between qualia and the world they potentially represent can be broken?

Derrida’s sceptical arguments are not directed at the ‘objective’ world, but at the ‘subjective objective’ of phenomenology. He does not argue that the link between signs and objects is always already broken – he has no interest in this question. Derrida argues that the sign itself is always already broken; that no sign can be fully apprehended or possessed. It is only the belief in an unmediated relationship between subject and sign – which is contrasted to a relationship between subject and object mediated by the sign – that allows scepticism, in its normal philosophical sense, to get started. Derrida’s arguments about signs are therefore profoundly anti-sceptical, on my read; but they also have a great deal to say about traditional epistemology, and the themes of certainty and uncertainty it meditates upon.

All this is clearly connected to Time, in a way that I don’t have much of a handle on. The locus of a guaranteed relation between subject and sign is the present; it is only present experience that possesses this quality of absolute belonging. And thus the claim that there is no such thing as the present – as it has been traditionally understood by philosophy – is at the heart of Derrida’s work.

I think that all this is probably very relevant to probability theory. But I don’t know how: it’s just a hunch. What I want to do, then, is try to get to grips with probability. For instance – it’s interesting to me that Keynes’s first major work (which he spent something like ten years writing) is a treatise on probability. From what I’ve gathered (from, like, paragraph-length summaries) Keynes’s thesis is that relationships of probability are logical in the same way as relationships of necessity. It’s interesting to me that Keynes developed this thesis in an intellectual environment (early 20th century Cambridge) that was also giving birth to analytic philosophy. Keynes’s philosophical mentor was G.E. Moore – and Keynes has remarked that Moore was just as important, for his intellectual development, as his economic mentor Marshall. I’d be interested to try to understand the connections between Keynes’s treatise and modal logic, as it subsequently developed in analytic philosophy. (I’ve never studied modal logic). And I’m also interested in Quine’s attempt to demolish modal logic – an attempt that, as I understand it, relies heavily on Quine’s belief that the ‘opacity’ of signs must be eradicated from logical analysis. This Quinian argument, it seems to me, is staggeringly vulnerable to Derridean critique.

But all this, as I say, is just a quick jotting down of ambitions and connections. As if this blog wasn’t already ambitious enough.

An Advertising Breakthrough

I know this blog has many avid readers in the advertising community. And a lot of people would like me to spend more time highlighting new commercials from around the world. Unfortunately, I’m pressed for time – so let me instead ‘advertise’ (!) a valuable new resource. ‘The Ideas Brothers‘, a viral new blog, provides brainstormed content for a 24/7 world. These brothers are true creatives – catch them now before they become Saatchi and Saatchi!

Textbook Lore

Reading the excellent ‘EconoSpeak‘ (to my knowledge the best lefty economics blog out there, after Robert Vienneau), I come across this comment thread, discussing the flaws of undergraduate textbooks. Sandwichman (one of the blog’s authors) writes:

“My impression was that textbooks are corporate projects that are endorsed by a celebrity academic “author”. What fascinates me is not what is left out of the textbooks but “textbook lore” that is repeated in textbook after textbook but has no scholarly basis in the discipline itself.”

This is the kind of thing I worry about, as I try to teach myself economics from elementary textbooks. Presumably the textbooks’ mad claims sometimes don’t have much relation to the mad claims of economics proper – even after taking into account the supposedly ‘necessary’ (but often ideologically motivated) oversimplifications that characterise any beginners text. I’m not sure what to do about this – whether to keep on plugging at the simple stuff, or try to dive in to the real deal and endure months or years of total incomprehension. If anyone has any suggestions about the best way to approach things, they’d be appreciated.

[This post, I fear, inaugurates the 'any passing thought' era of the blog...]

Definite

A little while ago I linked to a novel that the Comte de Rotherhithe was publishing online.  I was, I fear, lukewarm in my praise; perhaps the Comte got caught in the field of my self-assault.  At any rate, he is now publishing a second novel, ‘Definite’, and I want to draw your attention to it.  It’s not, I don’t think, the masterpiece I’m waiting for; but it’s proper writing. 

Somewhere in Burroughs’ collected interviews, he’s asked if any critical praise he’s received has been particularly important to him.  Burroughs replies that Samuel Beckett was once asked what he thought of Burroughs’ work.  Beckett lapsed into long silence.  Eventually, Burroughs tells us, Beckett replied, “grudgingly”: “Well – he’s a writer.”  I’m not Samuel Beckett.  But the Comte de Rotherhithe is a writer.

From the first chapter:

Before the song ends she takes off her sunglasses and gives a forlorn rub to one eye, then her head is turned as stones are turned on riverbeds by the water passing over. She looks down into the gardens below and I can’t see what she is looking at or guess what thoughts passed over to turn her.

From the sixth chapter:

I could, of course, tell him that there is really no place to have sex in a city where you are free of its mechanics; free from the opening and closing of doors and the compulsion to sleep in a bed if it is there and so, in sex, not only are two bodies negotiating each other’s pleasure, but the presence of the city itself. We fuck on amid electronic noises, in buildings that were built to direct the action, to modify how it unfolds. We assess angles and positions with respect to rooms and, somewhere, during the opening and closing of doors; the switching on or off of lights; the slow dimming of them; the running of baths, we cease to question if this is how it has always been. As the cities’ arms push on arses in curious and unfair rhythms, spread legs, massage balls, a new electrosexual world emerges to exert pressure subtly on delicate frames. But despite it all, beneath any sentiment or hilarity or electronic jagged pianos grinding, this is how sex has always been – fleshy business as usual.

From the third chapter, and the Comte’s homepage:

And why am I here? I have come to see these hungry young men: hungry as I am and making themselves thirsty in this effort as I make myself thirsty. In the ring where the edges of the world are weaved into ropes and pulled out into corners that catch falls, push men back into the action; where, with their brutal or sublime style, they are out to make it – to make money and make a life that can be lived with that same style that bursts unconsciously from their body’s design. And I feel the fight is asking them a question that I am also asking myself and that, even thirty years ago, would not have been asked. It is the question that is prompted as your voice is lost down the phone; as you drive at ninety along the motorway and suddenly realise your unnatural speed; when you see another space-shuttle launched that means nothing to you; when you touchdown in a sunset that you’ve already seen in the clouds and feel hours out of time. Then, with your constitution massacred, your mind cut from body, travelling beyond the capacity you can feed, you understand you could dissolve at any moment. This is when the question comes: what is it that my body needs to do? This question, as enthusiasm wanes for spreading ourselves out thinly across the earth, for feeling the functions of blood and pulse taken away from by flicking switches, as everything is given a face-lift or augmented to make it as big and grotesque as possible then this question will get asked again and again. What is it that my body needs to do?

Read the Comte’s work; he’s the real thing.

I Has Teh Internets!!!1!!

I am now officially a member of the online web-based community.  I can browse, surf, post, e-mail, and indulge in interminable bitter comment thread disputes from the comfort of my very own home.  I’m not sure what effect this’ll have on the blogging.  Most likely, it’ll herald a drastic drop in quality.  Between the laptop keyboard and the internet cafe falls the shadow.  The shadow’s wealth of second thoughts has saved me from many a foolish post before.  No longer!  Now, within seconds of an unconsidered thought grazing the edge my mind, it’ll be written up, posted, and regretted.  So it goes.  The main plus point: it hopefully won’t take me a week or more to respond to comments now.

I was going to put up a load of pictures up to celebrate, but the internet won’t let me into Flikr, because I can’t figure out how to turn off my anti-porn software.  Ah dear.  Here’s a laughing out loud cat instead.