Lars Iyer's Blog, page 76

Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? How can he explain it to me?

There's story by Kafka - a parable really. The Master demands that his servant saddle up his horse. 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. - 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Why did he come crawling back? What secret fatality led him home? Why was he chained to Britain as a dog to its vomit? Was it some inadequacy? Some sense that he didn’t belong among the cafes and cobbled streets? Was it British inadequacy? British stupidity? A British inability to take himself seriously as a thinker?

Perhaps he lacked some dimension of belief: W. sometimes thinks that. He lacked a real sense of himself as a thinker: that’s what he had to conclude, W. says. He wasn’t ready for Old Europe. Britain sits too deeply inside him. He bones were British bones. His heart beat British blood. The voices in his head were British voices.

What could he do but come home? What, to the country that is completely opposed to thought, and in which thought can only be rebellion and despair, and wild, vague pathos? Perhaps we need something to think against, W. says. Perhaps thought needs an enemy. Or perhaps it is just his weakness, he who has never done anything but react against the horror of Britain. Against the horror of capitalism! Perhaps there are more affirmative ways to think, to live ...

Away-From-Here ... But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters ... 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and some of the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. They compromised, he says, they who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another place; that life moved in Old Europe like fire in fire, like weather on the sun ...

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.

In the end, he's still not sure what messianism really means, W. says. Messianic: that's what he wrote in his Facebook profile under religion. Messianic: he wrote that under politics, too, without understanding what he'd written.

What does it mean to talk about the messianic when neither of us is in the least bit religious? What, to dream of a messianic politics?

It has something to do with the apocalypse, W. says. He’s certain of that. The Messiah, the apocalypse: you can't have one without the other. The Messiah only arrives at the end of times, in the Last Days, W. says. It's only at the end of politics that politics might become messianic. And perhaps we are at the end of politics, W. says. Perhaps politics really is over.

Evening. W’s college, at the edge of Dartmoor.

Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Spread blankets and a portable MP3 player pounding out Jandek’s Modern Dances.

This is his kind of political protest, W. says.

W.’s disappointed that none of his sport science students have joined the occupation. He thought he might have been able to turn them. He thought they might have ended up on his side, armed with cricket bats and hockey sticks. Hadn't he promised them extra credit, if they joined the revolution?

But his philosophy postgraduates are out in force, W. says. The last humanities students of the college! The brave three hundred, who will stand against like Leonidas's Spartans against the enemy army.

But there is no army. Only a lone security guard, sitting on a plastic chair.

They were a phalanx, he and his fellow Essex postgraduates. They faced outwards, together. They faced Britain, faced the forces of capital with their shelds locked together, and their spears poking out. And isn't that what we'll be doing today: facing the forces of capital with our shields locked together. With our spears poking out!

Shoulder to shoulder: that's how we must stand, W. says. Sharing the risk equally. Each sustaining each other's courage. Each holding each other's place in the line of battle ...

No one will break the phalanx. - 'Not even you, fat boy!' No breach will be opened, so long as we all stand firm. And the enemy will hear our battle cry. Capitalism will hear our battle cry: pallasch, pallasch, pallasch!

Political despair: that's what we should guard against, W. says. Political defeatism.

The danger is that we are in love with the loss of politics, W. says. That we are happy with it; that we depend on it. That we love Britain, even as we pretend to hate it. That we love our own inertia, our own impotence ...

'The self must be broken in order to become itself', W. quotes from Kierkegaard. And mustn't politics, too, be broken? Mustn't politics, too, be brought to its knees?

There’s always a danger of revelling in our woes, of taking refuge in depression: that's what Kierkegaard warns us of, W. says. We need to intensify our despair, to despair over it, that’s what Kierkegaard tells us, W. says. We must despair over our despair of politics! We must double up our despair, setting despair against despair, if we are ever to transform despair into faith!

The trick of politics is knowing when to act, according to Debord, W. says. You have to study the logic of politics. You have to learn lessons from it. And, sometimes, you have to set the rules yourself, and follow those rules through to the end.

To act! To strike! To remake the terrain of politics, the nature of politics! That should be our aim, W. says.

We need a strategy!, W. says. We need tactics! We need to aim our blow, as Clausewitz puts it, on the centre of gravity of the whole war. And it is a war, W. says. Politics is war, at the end of times.

The desert is growing, W. says. I’m writing more, much more than he can follow on my blog, my infernal blog. Posts about him. About us! It’s remorseless. Thousands and thousands of words. Day after day.

Don’t I know there’s a war on – a philosophical war?, W. says. Why am I not marching to the philosophical front lines, like him, to do my bit?

His sports science students are complaining, W. says. They don’t see the relevance of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz to badminton ethics. They don't understand why they're being made to study the guerilla tactics of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh in a module on shot-put metaphysics.

'War has no constant dynamic', he quotes, 'just as water has no constant form'. 'The skilful strategist defeats the enemy without doing battle', he quotes. 'The enemy advances, we retreat', he says. 'The enemy sets up camp, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue'.

If he can’t make his sports science students into a guerrilla army, W. says, he might make them into beasts of burden instead. Hasn’t he dreamt that he might saddle them up and ride them, placing bits between their teeth? Philosophical bits! The bits of Rosenstock! Of Rosenzweig! Hasn’t he dreamt of kicking literary spurs into their sides? The spurs of Kafka! Of Krasznahorkai!

W. dreams of mounting his last postgraduate students on the backs of his sports science students. Of combining brain and brawn, like Master/Blaster in Mad Max III: Beyond the Thunderdome. He and his army would take to the hills, W. says, getting reading to charge the college in a few months time.

Time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions, our obstinacy, our narrowmindedness, our faith and our grief.

If people simply hear the word 'God' they become sad; it is sad when it has that effect. But wonders are forever occurring and people who think like that today will think differently tomorrow.

[Asked why he composes:] For me it's like breathing in and out. It's my life. What does a child do when he plays on his own? He sings. Why does he sing? Well, he is happy about something pretty, inspired by something. That is something quite healthy, quite natural. For adults this state is considerably more complex, for this harmony is smashed into pieces, it's lost. But can I exist without composing, my soul and my spirit? Music is already my language. My music can be an inner secret, even my confession. But what is my confession? I don't confess in the concert hall, in front of an audience. It is directed toward higher instances. The necessity for composing has many layers. They are like bridges, put on top of each other. And you never know which one you are just passing. Some are dangerous and you fall. Most important for me: that I cannot say in a few thousand sentences what I can say in a few notes.

In the Soviet Union, I once spoke with a monk and asked him how, as a composer, one can improve oneself. He answered me by saying that he knew of no solution. I told him that I also wrote prayers, and set prayers and the text of psalms to music, and that perhaps this would be of help to me as a composer. To this he said, 'No, you are wrong. All the prayers have already been written. You don't need to write any more. Everything has been prepared. Now you have to prepare yourself'. I believe that there's a truth in that.

Arvo Pärt, from various interviews

The suburbs are deepening in Reading, W. says. The suburbs are condensing. They're becoming more real. They've almost managed to pass themselves off as reality.

W. thinks of Philip K. Dick's gnostic vision. For Dick, the world as we see it is a stage-set. It's false. History ended in AD57. It ended when the Roman Empire reigned triumphant. The empty-headed yuppie is really a centurion, W. says. The company manager is an tribune. Reading is really Rome, just as all towns and cities are Rome.

W. thinks of the Biblical cities: of Sodom and Tyre. Of Babylon and Jericho. Aren't they really one city, the same city, the same horror?

But in Reading, it will only ever be the '80s, W. says. The council houses are being eternally sold off. The markets are being eternally deregulated. The corporations are eternally moving in. The housing estates are eternally being built. The golf courses are eternally opening up. The gypsies are being eternally moved on.

The suburbs are deepening, W. says. Reading looks like its succeeding. Reading is passing itself off as utopia. Reading says: this is the future. This is all there every can be. But the financial storms is coming, W. says. The banks will fall, and Reading, too, will fall.

The main road, thick with cars. Big cars. Company cars, shining, pristine! BMWs, and that sort of thing. It's so crowded! So congested! There's no space here, W. says. Every road's going somewhere... Every car's on its mission... 

W. sees our inability to drive as a kind of heroism. We're holding out!, he says. We're the last pedestrians! Cars are a materialism of capital, he says. An embodiment of capitalist flows. It's the same with the planes that cross the sky. We must have nothing to do with planes, W. says. We must never fly again.