iSiS?

Two things I want to write it down concerning ISIS.

Firstly, I don’t find it particularly difficult to understand why young men and young women might choose to travel to fight with ISIS. Despite coming from a privileged background myself I was aggressively favourable towards the IR A in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I fantasised about some heroic context for the red Brigades in Italy. I was brought up on stories of heroic socialist men travelling down to fight with the free brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Its doesn’t seem a great stretch of the imagination to recognise that the young men leaving, the young women leaving to go to Syria are inspired by the same complex of belief and gut emotional reaction as I was. The system under which we live and which is we regulate by our daily choices doesn’t encourage us to admit such things publicly. Isis is the face of evil only overshadowed by the face of Putin.

Secondly, I have been thinking about the families of the fighters, particularly those families who are bereaved but also those who wait for their children to return, who hope their children might return. I was struck earlier in the week about the reporting of a traffic accident in South Yorkshire where at five young people were killed, all of whom were or had been pupils at a particular school. The news journalist was talking with the head teacher of the school who was emphasising that to the school was ensuring that the bereavement and grief of the pupils was addressed. Bereavement counsellors would be present, the school would look for moments in which children would be able to express their feelings. An intense social awareness was manifested that it was important to deal properly with bereavement rather than hide from it.

What happens I started to think, to the parents of the fighters who have gone to Syria? When a Bangladeshi family in Portsmouth hears that their son has died, are they offered counselling? Does the wider community receive attention, a sympathetic ear and an understanding of their bereavement? It appears from the outside that it is more likely the families are withdrawn on themselves. There is no engagement with a public world that might offer them sympathy. They are almost demonised as if in some way they were to blame for something that generations of young men and women have always and already done.

today is a mirror too

Walking through the Sheffield I pass a man who is often busking in the town centre.

He plays sometimes a guitar, today, I think, some sort of small stringed instrument,

perhaps, or was it a small keyboard. He plays them like I might play them at times,

just making noise using the machine on his lap. He sings over the top of the sound he

makes improvising, or so it seems. A box on the ground to collect money. I gave him a

pound and heard him singing:

Today is a mirror too.

Today is a mirror too.

Today is a mirror too.

Today is a mirror too.

That sums up how I feel today but.

But.

I spoke with a friend, Mark Lallemand, and heard of his weekly visits to care for his

father who has advanced Parkinsons and very painful cancer. His father screams with

pain and was in in working life a well respected oncological surgeon. Depressing I

say but Mark tells me that there is more to it than that – the closeness he gains with

his father, they have never cried together, other noble feelings. We avoid pain in the

society and it is a last taboo. I had asked about how he felt about ending suffering like

that? He believed we needed to accept pain rather than kill it – literally – he was not in

favour of euthanasia fearing it could lead to abuse. However another friend came up

asking if the pain was under control? Clearly it was an issue and not a joy. Ending it

through pain therapy was fine but there was nobility in suffering if there was really

no choice.

This didn’t happen today however. That is not the mirror then.

I sleep each night with the sense that the next day will bring clarity but the morning

brings – not only – haze. That was today.

I spent the day – on and off – exchanging irritations with the one I love – bouncing

around not getting hurt.

I helped complete forms with a Roma family. They talked about food and then one

of the adults, the Grandfather, gave some coins to his daughter who lives with them.

She returned from the corner shop some minutes later with a bag of potatoes and the

Grandmother proceeded to grate them into a bowl in the sitting room while I aksed

about expenditure, outgoings, benefits, income, gas, electricity, food budgeting. They

have been sent a form to help them apply for assistance with an outstanding water bill

– but – this particular branch of the family have no other ‘priority’ debts and they need

two debts to have the chance of success. Hard to explain this is as they thought the

form was from a debt collector. That’s today.

Alot of smoking. Not by me today but the family and thus alot of coughing. I find that

my friend Dz has an appointment with a consultant plastic surgeon. He has two fingers

on his left hand that are dead – the can only bend at the lower knuckle and the rest

are soft with no muscle. Much flesh and tendon was lost in an accident with a window

4 years ago in Slovakia. Can it be fixed he wonders? Could I get disability? Ask the

surgeon I say. That’s today.

Zizek (again)

As I listened and watched “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” Zizek’s second full-length film with Sophie Fiennes. I’d tried watching it one time and had found it frustrating purely because I had heard many of the philosophical anecdotes in other lectures by Zizek. Yesterday evening I watched it the whole way through and enjoyed it immensely. So here are four little notes from the film just written down as aids to my appallingly poor memory.

The big other

We need the big other as something for which we maintain appearances.

Melancholy

True melancholy is the recognition of a loss of desire

Vampires

The rich revitalising themselves from the poor

Dreams

Wrong dreams – those that are no more than an idealised reflection of our position as consumers.
Right dreams – that aim beyond the ideological

Don’t change reality to fit your dreams, change your dreams.

of ants and men

ant

So I was discussing this notion of thought not taking place before action but being some sort of ephemera taking place as an explanation rather than being part of a decision making process. My friend Steve listened to me talking about this yesterday evening and pointed out that such an idea was in itself a form of positivist thinking very typical of the British intellectual tradition. The notion that in the end meaning was discoverable even if that meaning was a negation of us as independent actors. I’m not sure that I fully agree with this but it was a very useful point to make to me, to see what I am saying as a form of embedded scientism.

However, and in relation to Bourdieusian work, seeing human beings as ants, that is as creatures whose behaviour is so limited by the structures within which there activity lies that there are effectively no traces but only what externally appear to be statistical variations, can be understood within the context of habitus. Habitus is:

… The durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.
Bourdieu, 1977, p.78

In other words habitus is seen in the wiggling antennae of the ant – the antness of the ant reproducing the regularities immanent in being an ant.

But Steve texted me – “We are not ants we are men” – and I can’t disagree with that either.

He has read and learned alot about the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and has been influenced by a remarkable academic I spent a few days with a year or so ago (with Steve too) called Johan Siebers. The link to his page will bring up some interesting papers.

There’s alot of positivity in the not knowing of Bloch. Of this perhaps more another time.

101

I am a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends.  I was at meeting for worship in Sheffield this morning and heard R, a prominent Quaker I’d say, speak about her love of passage 1.01 from Advices and Queries.  Here it is:

As Friends we commit ourselves to a way of worship which allows God to teach and transform us. We have found corporately that the Spirit, if rightly followed, will lead us into truth, unity and love: all our testimonies grow from this leading.

This relates pretty directly to my last post about cause and effect and the idea that thought is something that comes after as an ordering of the event. In 1.01 Quakers express this idea that God can teach and transform if the Spirit is (rightly) followed.  In worship Quakers wait on the Spirit with the belief that there is an urgency to action that comes not from thinking but through alignment with something existing beyond our material bodies, at its most material understood as a form of Jungian human collaborative Spirit.  The notion is there that right action is that which aligns with God’s will which is beyond words (thus beyond thought).

When God is however materialised as – for sake of convenience – what Zizek via Lacan calls the big other – then the complicating factor becomes not if God exists but rather what God exists – then the question might become how do we avoid doing what God wills for us?

a posteriori (afterthoughts)

In a long discussion with who I cannot remember, but in a sad frame of mind at the time, I started to think about cause and effect. Perhaps it was with Melissa that I talked and I think I probably spoke to myself a fair amount at the time as well.

Dear Mr Zizek had pointed out in one of the audio or video recordings of his lectures that there was a suggestion that electronic activity which could be measured to demonstrate mental engagement took place infinitesimally after an action itself. The suggestion being made was that our thoughts about things, our decision-making capacities, were a posteriori, made after the event rather than being something that took place before.

The thought that we have of ourselves as having the potential to make decisions rather than being creatures just acting without the particular engagement of decision-making thought is uncomfortable. It is also not true and certainly would not have been a point that Zizek was making. So it is not to say that we have no impact or that culture and (in a Zizek’s terms) ideology plays no role in action but rather that there is also something else. There is also no decision. Our mental states are the measuring out of an increasingly complex web of connections.

This seems in some ways an absurd statement. When I sit down to turn on the kettle and a whole host of material events of really quite extraordinary complexity take place to produce hot water, in what way it makes any sense to suggest that humans have not made decisions which results in this trail of discoveries is not clear. Of course we observe very intricate mechanisms every moment of our lives and do not assume them to have a decision at their origin. Indeed for the atheists the absurdity of deism is well explored through the notion of God as the originator, the decision maker. The world as a well regulated clock mechanism and God as the watchmaker. Yet when it comes to the human, what we appear to observe as decisions, do not appear absurd.

The scientific method, perhaps the location one might think of the most observable of decisions, is at the same time the place where the least decision takes place. Is not the ideal scientific method one which does not know the answer? Where a decision is not made? Something is set in train and is observed and then copied more or less successfully?

We have some sort of ordering mechanism which is what we are. We are both a division, a permanently dividing being and we are an ordering being permanently ordering. What we understand as free will is equally explicable as our accounting for something. The Zen Buddhist, the person who acts without intermediary, the Samuri swordsman, these too acknowledge that decision has no real place. But neither of course does ethical purity. The vindictive murderer who also slices off somebody’s head has no separate ethical stance to the noble swordsman. There may be some sort of ideological construct with which we are explaining to ourselves what we have already done, in such micro microseconds that we cannot even be aware of it.

If I start thinking like this then it is quite enjoyable, rather like actively imagining the world revolving on its own axis while it’s revolves around the sun which still appears to our eyes to revolve around us. Such major material differences that continue to evade our senses.

And then we die!

the Califano clan…

During our time in the Ardeche we visited Claude Califano and her parents Gaetan and Monique. How long is it since I have seen them? 30 years at least. What was strange about being with them again with their wayward daughter Claude is quite simply that nothing had changed in a sense. Everybody looked exactly the same if a little older. Gaetan still sported the same little beard and Monique the same haircut. We sat on the same terrace at the same table and the food was prepared on the same kitchen units in the same kitchen. Claude still was acting like a troublesome teenager insisting on listening to music on her telephone during the meal although she is 54 and her parents still tut-tutted whilst she did so. We had a lovely time and Saskia really enjoyed being with Claude and her parents. Claude was very affectionate towards the three children and paid particular attention to Ella.

Gaetan, Monique, Saskia and Claude at the house in Salavas.
Gaetan, Monique, Saskia and Claude at the house in Salavas.