Farmers Letters

Friday, September 29, 2017

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

English Follies

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,
To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points who pleasingly confounds
Surprises, varies, and conceals the Bounds.

Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th' ambitious Hill the heav'n to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,
Calls in the Country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks or now directs th' intending Lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Still follow Sense, of ev'ry Art the Soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from Difficulty, strike from Chance;
Nature shall join you, Time shall make it grow
A Work to wonder at--perhaps a STOWE.

-Alexander Pope, "Epistle to Burlington"

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

враг народа

Step foward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall.
But in consideration of
your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

— Bertolt Brecht, "Interrogation of the Good"

Monday, September 25, 2017

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Friday, September 22, 2017

Zizek's 'Against' National Autarchy, Yet "Non-Prescriptive"

“Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.”

-Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Zizek pens "Revelations" for "Communists" (on the capitalist end-time).

This muggy, rainy London evening I had the opportunity to take in two intellectual titans debate. The topic for debate was something which has been in the forefront of my own mind for sometime and has been brought up by those I’m close to also. It’s something you’ve probably considered recently too – “How the fuck do we get ourselves out of this shit?” It doesn’t get more pertinent.

The real reason behind the evening was to discuss Zizek’s new book ‘The Courage of Hopelessness’. Something which I haven’t read however that shouldn’t stop me from discussing it, or so the author alluded in lively debate. Will Self was the contrarian and antagonist who questioned the text with academic vigor, occasionally however falling back on his British whiteness and loquaciousness to provide colloquial cheap laughs and disrupt the flow of Zizek and the rhythm of debate.

Over the course of an hour and a half the pair entered the heady ground of philosophy where members of the audience were either lost or engaged. I was lost however I was reassured by Slavoj who suggested that I needn’t read Lacon as Will Self asked him the importance of Lacon and others in the coming revolution/ catastrophic event. This was Will Self’s over-riding line of questioning – “what can we do then?” This hopelessness was exasperating eventually. Not having read the book I couldn’t side with the critique however I have seen the Chomsky Zizek spat played out on youtube and it seemed Self was echoing Noam. The problem with all of the figures above is that none can provide you with a vision of the future, in reality. Their “intellectual grandstanding” is either contagious or as bad as each other. The key point Slavoj made was “Learn, learn, learn, learn.” This was his activism, and all the other isms that Will Self could throw at him. Self’s major critique is inherent in his main point of argument, one of systemic violence, which remained unanswered by Zizek and Self himself. Something which any conscious and mindful human will have wrestled with since becoming conscious and human.

My own point of view is that hypocrisy is innate. This is something I have argued for time, blud. I think that in our society it is impossible to be good or evil or to even split the two. The large scale implications of small acts are impossible to judge without causing serious dilemma and anguish. The balancing act of living make in a “good” manner is so riddled with pitfalls that it is impossible, this surely highlights the failures of our current capitalism better than anything. You just have to hope that the outcome outweighs the contributing factors. The two examples that I could think of were;

1. I don’t approve of the actions of Starbucks but have a serious headache due to caffeine deficiency, which has devolved through a local social enterprise. In order to stop my headache do I go to the only nearby caffeine outlet which happens to be Starbucks?

2. A war is being fought over the minerals in a certain region. The population of the country is likely to incur serious mortality due to this war. Over the border, a tyrant has been over thrown as a result of the other countries mineral output in newly spread mobile phones. The population of the newly free state is similar to that of the state at war and now free however the war over the border now seems likely to end.

Ya know?

What if you vote Corbyn? This was discussed. As well as the idea of a elite hierarchic who have ultimate control. Both ideas seemed reasonable at the time. But neither would change anything. I mean… Fuck. Then they started to talk about the idea of Bio-robotics and other such stuff which I haven’t the time or energy to think about yet. Which is ok apparently, just expect to be part of the underclass. Then a Chinese guys asked a question, and along the way, he said “Confusion is progress.” Which is confucius- n in itself. Geddit.
But that was actually the best thing, I hope he’s right.

Mr Hummels

PS
This evening got me thing about my long held belief that we cannot achieve a truly equal socialism until after the singularity. But let me explain that another time. It’s as a consequence of capitalism and technology, ya dig. Also, will Will Self read this? No as its in a deep corner of the internet, but if it were somewhere popular, does he use computers? If a Will Self reading on the internet thinks about a Slavoj Zizek book, is he violent?

Also, Will Self’s pushing for an answer on what do we do was not only unanswered by himself but irrelevant if Zizek is a commentator and not a philosopher. He is a guide for those who are looking to take the path. Whether anyone takes the path, or he is helpful along that path is up for debate.

I’ll try and find the video recorded on the night so you can see why my heads turned.

Mr. Hummels

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Against Nationalism. The Crazies are Coming!

The saber rattling and harsh rhetoric during the current nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula should remind mankind of something we have forgotten. Atomic weapons are terrifying things, and talk of using them should be a taboo subject.

A week or so ago, I found myself reading Agatha Christie’s 80th, and penultimate, book, "Passenger to Frankfurt," and its relevance to today struck me. The book was published in 1970, with the subtitle “an extravaganza,” is an utter failure and was often characterized as an “incomprehensible muddle”; however, this "muddle" is not due to Christie’s old age or senility: instead, its causes are clearly political.

Passenger to Frankfurt is Christie’s most personal, intimately felt, and at the same time most political novel. It expresses her personal confusion, her feeling of being totally at a loss with what was going on in the world in the late 1960s – the drugs, the sexual revolution, student protests, murders, etc. So it's no wonder that Passenger to Frankfurt is not a detective novel. There is no murder, no logic, and deduction. This feeling of the collapse of the elementary cognitive mapping, this overwhelming fear of chaos, is rendered precisely in Christie’s introduction to the novel:
“Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England. Look at that front page every day for a month, make notes, consider and classify. Every day there is a killing. A girl strangled. An elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meager savings. Young men or boys attacking or attacked. Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted. Drug smuggling. Robbery and assault. Children missing and children’s murdered bodies found not far from their homes. Can this be England? Is England really like this? Not yet, but it could be. Fear is awakening, a fear of what may be. And not only in our own country. There are smaller paragraphs on other pages giving news from Europe, from Asia, from the Americas, in Worldwide News. Hi-jacking of planes. Kidnapping. Violence. Riots. Hate. Anarchy. All growing stronger. All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure in cruelty. What does it all mean?”
Is our era with “leaders” like Donald Trump and Kim Yong Un not as crazy as her vision? Are we today not all like a bunch of passengers to Frankfurt?
So what does all this mean? In the novel, Christie provides her answer – a terrible worldwide conspiracy which has something to do with Richard Wagner and "The Young Siegfried." We learn that, toward the end of World War II, Hitler went to a mental institution, met with a group of people who thought they were Hitler, and exchanged places with one of them, thus surviving the war. He then escaped to Argentina where he married and had a son who was branded with a swastika on his heel – “The Young Siegfried.” Meanwhile, in the book's present, drugs, promiscuity, and student protests are all secretly caused by Nazi agitators who want to bring about anarchy so that they can restore Nazi domination on a world scale.

Global delirium

This “terrible worldwide conspiracy” is, of course, ideological fantasy at its purest: a weird condensation of the fear of extreme right and extreme left. The least we can say to Christie’s credit is that she locates the heart of the conspiracy to the extreme right (neo-Nazis) and not in any of the other usual suspects (Communism, Jews, Muslims, etc.). The idea neo-Nazis were behind the ’68 student protesters and sexual liberation struggle, with its obvious madness, nonetheless bears witness to the disintegration of a consistent cognitive mapping of our predicament.

Christie is compelled to take refuge in such a crazy paranoiac construct as the only way to introduce some order and meaning into the utter confusion and panic she found herself in. But is her vision really too crazy to be taken seriously? Is our era with “leaders” like Donald Trump and Kim Yong Un not as crazy as her vision? Are we today not all like a bunch of passengers to Frankfurt? Our situation is messy in a way very similar to the one described by Christie: a rightist government enforcing workers’ rights (in Poland), a leftist government pursuing the strictest austerity politics (in Greece). Thus, it's no wonder that, to regain a minimal cognitive mapping, Christie resorts to WWII, “the last good war,” retranslating our mess into its coordinates.

One should nonetheless note how the very form of Christie’s answer (one big secret agent behind it all) strangely mirrors the fascist idea of the Jewish conspiracy: how there is one big Nazi plot behind which lies the explanation to everything. And, today, the extreme populist right proposes a similar explanation of the Muslim immigrant “threat.” In antisemitic imaginary, the “Jew” is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings, which is why Muslim immigrants are NOT today's Jews: they are all too visible, not invisible. They are clearly not integrated into our societies, and nobody claims they secretly pull strings - if one sees in their “invasion of Europe” a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it. As was the case in a text that recently appeared in one of the main Slovenian Rightist weekly journals where we could read: “George Soros is one of the most depraved and dangerous people of our time,” responsible for “the invasion of the negroid and Semitic hordes and thereby for the twilight of the EU... as a typical Talmudo-Zionist, he is a deadly enemy of Western civilization, the nation-state and white, European man.”

His goal is to build a “rainbow coalition composed of social marginals like faggots, feminists, Muslims and work-hating cultural Marxists,” which would then perform “a deconstruction of the nation-state, and transform the EU into a multicultural dystopia of the United States of Europe.” Furthermore, Soros is inconsistent in his promotion of multiculturalism: “He promotes it exclusively in Europe and the USA, while in the case of Israel, he, in a way which is for me totally justified, agrees with its monoculturalism, latent racism and building a wall. In contrast to the EU and USA, he also does not demand from Israel to open its borders and accept ‘refugees.' A hypocrisy appropriate to Talmudo-Zionism.”[Quoted from Bernard Brščič, ‘George Soros is one of the most depraved and dangerous people of our time’ (in Slovene), Demokracija, August 25 2016, p. 15.]

This is the end?

Is this disgusting fantasy which brings together antisemitism and Islamophobia so different from the one staged by Christie? Are they both not a desperate attempt to orient oneself in confused times? The extreme oscillations in the public perception of the Korean crisis are significant as such. One week we are told we are on the brink of nuclear war, then there is a week of respite, then the war threat explodes again. When I visited Seoul in August 2017, my friends there told me there is no significant threat of a war since the North Korean regime knows it cannot survive it, but now the South Korean authorities are preparing the population for a nuclear war.

In such a situation, where the apocalypse is on the horizon, one should bear in mind the standard logic of probability no longer applies, we need a different logic, described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy: “The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident… if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not occur, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity.”[ Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami, Paris: Seuil 2005, p. 19.] Dupuy provides the example of the French presidential elections in May 1995; here is the January forecast of the main polling Institute: “If on next May 8th, Mr (Édouard) Balladur will be elected, one can say the presidential election was decided before it even took place.”
The moment we fully accept the fact that we live on Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities.
When applied to the recent tension in Korea, this means: IF the war explodes, it will be necessary and inevitable; IF war will not explode, it was all a false alarm. This, according to Dupuy, is also how we should approach the prospect of nuclear (or ecological) catastrophe: not to “realistically” appraise the possibilities of the catastrophe, but to accept it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, on the background of this acceptance, we should mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the situation. Instead of saying “the future is still open, we still have the time to act and prevent the worst,” one should accept the catastrophe as inevitable, and then work to undo what is already “written in the stars” as our destiny.

What is needed is no less than a new global anti-nuclear movement, a global mobilization that would exert pressure on nuclear powers and act aggressively, organizing mass protests and boycotts, while denouncing our leaders as criminals and the like. It should focus not only on North Korea but also on those super-powers who assume the right to monopolize nuclear weapons. The very public mention of the use of nuclear weapons should be treated as a criminal offense. And more than that, a global change in our stance is needed, what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the domestication of the wild animal culture.”

Till now, each culture disciplined and educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power, but the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. Is today’s North Korea with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons, and rockets to deliver them to distant targets, not the ultimate example of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty?

However, the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities. A task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic “heroic” violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one’s specific cause.

-Slavoj Zizek, "Korean nuclear tension: Apocalypse... almost now"