Ill Communications

There are some things I prefer to stay quiet about, or joke about, rather than take them seriously. One is anything that relates to mental illness. One reason for not wanting to talk about mental illness is the fear that by doing so, not having any special words for it, I myself will become mentally ill: like when Nietzsche says gazing into the abyss leads the abyss to gaze back at you. (Incidentally I had a brief episode in my teens, in the course of a ‘what’s-it-all-about-Alfie’ moment when I tried to read Thus Spoke Zarathrusta, and, since I hadn’t developed any sort of knowledge beforehand about what Nietzsche was all about, it all ended quite abysmally.)

So the first question I ask myself is whether there is such a thing as mental illness, and that leads me into Foucault territory, in particular the matter of the relation of expert psychatric opinion: in his Abnormal lectures, he talks about how this opinion ‘(made) it possible to put in place or, in any case, to justify the existence of a sort of protective continuum through the social body ranging from the medical level of treatment to the penal institution strictly speaking, that is to say, the prison and, if it comes to it, the scaffold’.

I am afraid that, when confronting myself with this sort of thing on my lunch break, my response is like that of the Water Rat from Wind in The Willows, that what we are talking about is ‘the Wild World. And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please’.

The problem is that it’s hard not to be confronted with the matter of mental illness, or mental health, even on your lunch break. Yesterday the Guardian reported on Robert Enke, the German goalkeeper who committed suicide, reporting his as wife saying that he ’spent years trying to hide his mental illness, fearful it might destroy his career and cause the authorities to take away their adopted daughter, before he finally killed himself.’ and that ‘Enke, 32, who was a favourite to start in goal for Germany at the World Cup in South Africa next year, having overcome a series of personal tragedies and professional setbacks, left a suicide note in which he apologised to family and friends.’

What interests me here is the application of the term ‘mental illness’. Clearly he had been plunged into inestimable turmoil on account of his daughter’s death. But wouldn’t his response -his deep turmoil- fall into the normal range of reactions to such an event? So to talk about how he was mentally ‘ill’, for me, nearly -I am being deliberately tentative here- implies that there was something abnormal about his state of mind, when, given the circumstances, it would be something to be expected as falling within the normal range of responses. Or to put it another way, had he shown no outward reaction at all, and continued as though nothing had happened, would we be talking about him being mentally ill, even though that would be an abnormal response? You might counter that there are lots of people who lose children and do not commit suicide, and that’s true. But most of them are plunged into uncontrollable grief, and many go through long periods in which they find it difficult to go on living. Should we talk about them as mentally ill too? Or is it only when a number of boxes are ticked, in terms of a set of clinical criteria -the expert psychiatric opinion again- that we can talk about them as mentally ill?

There are millions of people prescribed anti-depressants in order to cope with life after losing a loved one. If they stopped taking anti-depressants and acquired the symptoms of clinical depression, would we describe them as mentally ill? If so, would it be right to talk of people currently under such medication as -thinking of a current trend- possessing an underlying medical condition?

It feels as though in many cases, the category of mental illness -backed up with a scarcely more precise diagnosis like ‘clinical depression’- serves, in similar cases, to explain away, to place under control, the infinite fragility and contingency of everyday life. Maybe having this apparatus of knowledge, control and treatment in place serves to tell us that in the end, everything can be turned out all right. Yet it seemed Robert Enke for one had developed a fear of the same apparatus that was supposed to come to his aid.

Perhaps every instance of what we encounter as mental illness through interaction and observation with the subject, can, with sufficient tools of investigation, be identified in neurobiological terms, that is, they have a physical manifestation, and they are therefore physical illnesses and ought to be treated with medication, surgery or therapy, to alleviate suffering, as with any other physical illness. The problem is that the general category of ‘mental illness’ has a stigma and physical illness does not.

There is a long history of investigation into the stigma attached to mental illness and the culture in which it flourishes, and I am almost entirely ignorant of it. However, I guess that part of the stigma arises from the idea that a person with mental illness cannot be trusted to follow the same rules and conventions as a ’sane’ person. When we talk about someone as mentally ‘disturbed’, maybe what we often mean is that they have the potential to behave in a way that disturbs the normal course of events. They defy what is held to be reasonable behaviour. Hence talk of lunatics, nutters, headcases, loopers, madmen and madwomen and so forth goes way beyond the description of people who have been clinically diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness.

It may be that the stigma is also grounded in the fear that there is no underlying sanity in the rules and conventions we accept as necessary. If I am confronted with someone who by my lights refuses to accept the same rules and conventions as me, then he or she may pose a danger to my own sense of who I am and what I do. If I can resort to classifying this person as ‘mentally ill’, then this bolsters the proper order of things as I perceive it ought to be, and I can appeal to the brute facts of the ‘protective continuum’ mentioned above to cope with the disturbance.

An useful example of this occurred with the case of the man who railed against Pat Kenny on the Frontline show on Monday last. In the course of investigating why a man would do such a thing, in defiance of conventional behaviour, the Irish Independent, the Evening Herald and the Irish Times drew attention to Mr O’Brien’s ‘history of mental illness’.

Had the individual in question possessed a heart or kidney complaint, I doubt it would have been mentioned, because it would have been deemed entirely irrelevant. But it seems permissible to see mental illness as permeating every aspect of what a person with a ‘history of mental illness’ does. Furthermore, the introduction of the question of the man’s mental illness invites the reader to imagine that one would have to suffer from mental illness in order to create a disturbance on the show in the way that Mr O’Brien did.

Yet at the same time, while the TV show operates according to certain rules and conventions, there is no ultimate justification for the existence of these rules and conventions, since neither the form nor the content of the show are derived from some universally accepted natural order of things. Also, it was clear that many people were sympathetic to what he had to say. Whilst I might not share Mr O’Brien’s analysis, or his way of getting his point across, I see nothing that renders his intervention any less ’sane’ than the extremely artificial and rarefied environment in which his actions took place. But if we are led to understand his intervention in terms of ‘mental illness’, it gives us a starting point for returning things to proper order.

Stealing Is Wrong

Ibec Your Pardon

Pardon my Occitan, but what the sweet suffering fuck is this?

HSE inquiry into fees paid to Ibec – The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 09, 2009

“There are, in our estimation, over 50 HSE-funded agencies that pay a subscription to Ibec and as you can well imagine, irrespective of the times that we are in, the HSE need to ensure that we reduce duplication and challenge the way we do things for the benefit of the patients and clients.

“Accordingly, we are currently engaging with the service managers in order to see how we progress this issue to deliver the value that we seek,” he said.

Among the bodies believed to be members of Ibec are some of the country’s largest acute general hospitals such as St Vincent’s, the Mater and Tallaght in Dublin,

The HSE move comes as it emerged that State agencies and State-funded organisations are paying hundreds of thousands of euro to Ibec annually.

A series of parliamentary questions tabled to Ministers by Ruairí Quinn of the Labour Party has found that almost €500,000 will be paid this year by State agencies or organisations which operate under the remit of Government departments to Ibec.

However, this figure is certainly an underestimate of the true position. Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, Minister for the Environment John Gormley and Minister for Communications and Energy Eamon Ryan said membership of Ibec was a matter for the agencies and organisations concerned and that their departments did not hold such information.

In addition, The Irish Times understands the ESB, which was not included in the figures released to Mr Quinn, will pay €140,000 to Ibec this year.

Ibec, on its website, says it provides employer services, based on expert knowledge in areas such as employment law, industrial relations, human resource best practice, training and development and health and safety.

Fás, the State training agency, said it had paid fees of €58,583 to Ibec this year and a similar amount last year.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan said Anglo Irish Bank, now in public ownership, paid €24,903 to Ibec this year and €24,823 last year. He also said the Central Bank and the Financial Services Authority had paid €25,626 to Ibec this year.

I like to think of myself as fairly realistic about the prevailing character of the Irish state, but I’m starting to sense an as yet unidentified superego figure chuckling heartily at my Panglossian soft-headedness. Whilst I might imagine I am reasonably aware of the degree of influence exerted by big business interests on the state, in reality I’m an ignorant fool.

Like, I always knew that the free market doctrine promulgated at every opportunity on the airwaves by Ibec’s various talking heads was self-serving tripe, given the huge effective subsidies given to many of their members by government. But I had no idea that the organisation itself, which exists ‘to conspire against the public’, as Adam Smith would put it, received direct contributions from state agencies that exist to serve the public. So whereas Smith might say that the law ‘ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary’, in Ireland they are lubricated by taxpayer cash. Huzzah for corporatism!

Counterfactuals

Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Producers said depicting the fictional, non-German-controlled America cost upwards of 40 million reichsmarks per episode, with much of the budget going toward recreating the cities of Washington, D.C. and New York exactly as they would have appeared before the famous tide-turning Luftwaffe strike of 1951. In addition, test audiences reported being impressed by the show’s painstaking portrayal of a topsy-turvy 2009 in which American big-band music plays on every radio, Mickey Mouse spouts pro-Semitic propaganda from every cinema screen, and dilution of the supreme race runs rampant.

Gotta love The Onion. The only thing that will stop it from being good is if the Guardian decides to dedicate an In Praise Of… column to it.

Check Out Them Threads

 

Mindset of the mob can sway citizen journalism – The Irish Times – Fri, Nov 06, 2009

The most interesting thing about such threads is the mob mindset that seems to underlie them. They are not neutral conduits for spontaneous opinions, but channels dedicated to forms of disgruntlement from people with, for perhaps good reasons, no other outlet. Contributors appear to come to the process with a mindset possibly symptomatic of the isolationism involved in internet relationships generally, and anticipating a certain group dynamic. The tone of a thread seems to be set by the early contributors.

Most contributors appear mostly to want to draw attention to themselves, seeking to convey strength, cleverness, cynicism or aggression, while pre-empting the possibility of hostility or ridicule by pushing these responses in front like swords.

There isn’t all that much to disagree with here, though I have no idea what he means by the ‘isolationism’ of ‘internet relationships’. I stopped reading the comment threads on the Comment is Free site a long time ago, not so much because all comments are stupid, but because the incidence of moronic attention-seeking comments is so high that the thread is practically unreadable. Other newspaper sites are just as bad, if not worse. However, this is not so much a general problem with internet-related technology, as Waters seems to think, but a particular problem with the nature of responses certain news sites -as opposed to other sites that exist for the purposes of debate and discussion- tend to elicit. I suggest that this has more to do with the established role of newspapers, and the degree of influence they are thought to hold.

What’s interesting is the degree of importance that gets attached to comments (and latterly, to Twitter tweets). A lot of the time it’s as though the range of comments that might appear are held to be accurately indicative of some wider trends in public thought. They may not be, even though, particularly in the case of twitter trends, they perform a useful vox populi function for news sites on the lookout for cheaply sourced content.

Posting comments on newpaper site threads is very much a minority activity, and I do not think it wise to infer anything of wider social importance from them, particularly since it is difficult to know, aside from the question of how representative the comments are of any wider group, how many people actually read them, and how wide the actual influence of the comments therefore is. It would be like looking at a series of porno sites and concluding that people these days seem to do nothing but have degrading sexual encounters.

As someone who writes on a site that gets the odd comment, I would hazard a guess that the person most likely to attribute importance to the comments of a particular thread is the person who wrote the inciting post or article. I remember finding it both surprising and admirable a couple of years back to see Anthony Giddens write a post in which he responded to his (probably pseudonymous) critics, whom, in a forgivable lapse of terminological inexactitude, he described as ‘bloggers’. Surprising in the sense that I didn’t imagine that a prominent intellectual like Anthony Giddens was the sort of person who thought going through comment threads to read responses was a worthwhile activity, and that he deemed that the responses ought to be granted a degree of importance. Admirable in the sense that he didn’t really have to do it; he could have simply said nothing and justified his decision to do so based on the stance that anything that appeared in the comment threads was merely the work of attention-seeking sociopaths.

Grinding The Lens

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Do you know that TV ad for an insurance company that stitches together a load of resonant images from Ireland’s past, like Charlie Haughey appearing on TV to warn the nation that ‘we’ were living beyond ‘our’ means? The point of the ad seems to be the development of an idea that the company that insures your car is so woven into the fabric of one’s own memories, one’s own sense of the world, that it can be trusted, that it has a real personality, and that it is not in any sense contingent on fluctuations in your own personal fortunes, or that of the country you identify with.

To me, the ad barely resonates at all. So many of the images have no immediate personal relevance for me. I have no recollection of Charlie Haughey appearing on TV to make that address. It might have been broadcast to the North, but I wasn’t watching. Until the end of the 80s, the RTE signal we got in our house was never that reliable, and I only ever looked at it on a Friday afternoon for the children’s TV programmes, and even then it caused a strain on the eyes.

When did news start to make its way into my view of the world? I think it was around the time of the miners’ strike. To me, that event went on for an age. It lasted a year or so, which at the time was about an eighth of my life.

I had a video recording of Superman II, one of my favourite films back then, and the recording also took in the news report either immediately after or immediately before the film. It’s way over 20 years since I last looked at it, yet one of the images that lingers is that of the juxtaposed photos of Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, each occupying half the entire screen. I don’t remember what the Scargill photo looked like, but the Thatcher photo was the one they always used when they broadcast the audio from the House of Commons: her looking up, tidy, firm, resolute.

What does an eight year old learn from this image? A sense, I think, of a conflict between two individuals of equal power and stature. It is a long time ago, but I can also recall some of the analysis, if you can call it that, that got floated about in the media. That each was as stubborn and intransigent as the other, that neither was for backing down, and so on. So the sense that comes across is one of a conflict of personality.

Now, I can see that the focus on the respective personality traits of Thatcher or Scargill were merely a way of reducing the underlying conflict -between the mobilised working class and the capitalist state- to a mere question of personal disagreement, to be resolved through a degree of compromise. Yet in historical terms, there could be no question of any such compromise: what appears or gets represented as compromise in the confrontation between labour and capital can only ever be a deferral, a sublimation.

Or a defeat. But that depends whose terms you are applying. In an interview with Vincent Browne, Scargill dismisses the idea that the miners were defeated, since the epic nature of the miners’ struggle will always serve as an example to workers struggling under capitalism, no matter where or when. He cites the case of Jesus: no-one would say Jesus was defeated, even though he was crucified. This is true, but there is a problem. For every Jesus there are millions of people who struggled against oppression and were crushed for their resistance, but we know nothing about them because generations of historians writing from the perspective of the ruling class did not see fit to record what happened to them, even if they happened to know about it. We don’t know very much about the people who lived in villages laid to waste by the armies of the Roman Empire. There’s no guarantee that the reality of struggle will get recorded let alone remembered, and there is no guarantee that the miners’ strike will be remembered as Scargill is entitled to hope.

Certainly, as long as the miners’ strike is represented primarily in terms of a showdown between two individuals, the nature of what was really at stake is at risk of being buried and forgotten. An RTE radio news report (audio here) on Scargill’s visit, for instance, was introduced by Edith Piaf singing ‘Je ne regrette rien’. The connotations were fairly clear: the strike was some sort of drama long ended, and Scargill occupied the role of prima donna, and if he did not regret doing what he did, it is certainly something that he would do well to consider. It is hard to imagine a similar introduction being produced for anyone who actively participated in crushing the miners. An Independent columnist had a characteristically bone-headed response to the Scargill visit, claiming that it was down to Scargill’s leadership that miners ‘were starved back to work after a year of suffering. The mining industry subsequently collapsed’, the implication being that if the miners had quietly accepted their fate, they would have saved their jobs, as though it had not really been the intention of the capitalist state led by Thatcher to crush organised labour, and that Scargill had really put them up to it through his intransigence. But this is what you get when history is viewed through a lens that picks out isolated individuals and personal choices but sees neither labour nor capital; this is a lens that grew in power and scope once the miners were crushed.

Internet Pygmy Launches Assault On Cultural Colossus

I really shouldn’t.

Commentator on The Culture John Waters has rolled out his Serious Artillery today, taking aim at The Internet.

Only Blair has the right stuff for top EU position – The Irish Times – Fri, Oct 30, 2009

At the core of this culture is the idea that peace is natural and conflict always a self-serving choice made for base reasons by bad people. This outlook has gained increased traction of late as a result of the internet, which allows an active minority, overburdened with free time and entirely unburdened with responsibility or accountability, to increasingly dictate the drift of thought in our democracies.

So if only there were greater restrictions on free independent thought, people might get Serious. Only then could they attain the level of Seriousness needed to see Big Things like ‘the drift of thought’.

Serious people, in contrast to Those On The Internet, can see that Tony Blair is the man for President of the European Council, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Tony Blair is a Roman Catholic who does God, even though such people are eo ipso Serious. Nor has it anything to do with the fact that he speaks at Catholic Faith meetings attended by Serious people who even write about it in Italiano (see linked article by Giovanni Dell’Acqua, writing under a cryptic English-language pseudomym. ‘Ciò che abbiamo visto ieri a Rimini era un uomo continuamente proteso a imparare cose nuove, ad osservare la realtà nella sua incarnazione più profonda, e a portare la propria fede a misurarsi con ogni cosa’. I’m no Italian expert, but the grandiose generalities sound vaguely familiar)

….only Blair has the stature to transcend this narrow ambition, to redefine not just the council presidency but perhaps the entire EU project, as seen from both inside and outside the tent. If the EU is to shake off the sense of disconnection that has rendered it culturally moribund, what is required in the new job is a leader who can define the presidency outside the bureaucratic framework already established by EU institutions, signalling to the citizens of Europe and the wider world the EU is at last becoming a community of peoples.

There is something in this. Blair is despised across Europe because of his role in the invasion of Iraq. If he were to become president, he would serve to unite millions of people across EU countries who otherwise might find it difficult to articulate a common purpose. His appointment would be a signal, for instance, to the people of the Middle East, that the EU thinks it is a fairly good idea to bomb Arabs. Blair’s status as a uniter, and his friendship with the likes of George W. Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and Cliff Richard still has a lot of untapped potential.

Blair has the skills and personality to communicate a renovated message about the nature of the community, to nurture relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and to speak authoritatively about issues such as climate change, immigration and new models of economy.

Not a renewed message: a renovated one. A message with a kitchen extension and an en suite bathroom in the guest room. What Blair might say authoritatively about climate change and immigration I have no idea. On new models of economy, ten years of continuing policies initiated by Margaret Thatcher might suggest to Internet People like me that he does not know much about it, but this is because we are overburdened with free time and entirely unburdened with responsibility or accountability. Luckily We Internet People are also overburdened by power:

The danger is this perhaps final chance for the EU to become a genuine political organism may be scuppered by the underhand diplomacy of bloggers and pygmy politicians.

It is a pity indeed, that when NATO forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade some years back, that they did not also bomb the Blogger Embassy. That would have put manners on their underhand diplomatic corps. I would note in passing that it is not very nice to use pygmy in this context, though his ire is not directed at pygmy politicians qua pygmies, but rather issuing a deft ya-boo-sucks to politicians who do not possess Blair’s world-bestriding stature.

When the bloggers are not spitting at Blair because of his role in the invasion of Iraq, they are dismissing him as the sultan of spin. Although undoubtedly a politician of the media age, Blair also exhibits a deep seriousness that counterpoints his superstar image. You only have to look at his record – not least the legacy of peace on this island – to know that here is a politician who used his charisma to conceal a deeply serious heart, in many ways out of tempo with its time.

Spitting is a filthy habit, and I condemn those bloggers who engage in it, just as surely as I condemn those bloggers who use puns on Dire Straits song titles to make a point. I would, however, make a plaintive appeal to Mr Waters to expose these bloggers by name. Every paragraph is precious, particularly when it is his, but announcing, from his Olympian position, even a handful of names – sadbastard@internet.com, keyboardhitlerindrogheda, or whoever- would allow those who have just the right amount of free time, accountability and responsibility, to flush these Unserious goons from the body politic as though they were but a bothersome hardened stool. As for Blair’s ‘deeply serious heart’, only Serious people can grasp the deep seriousness of a man who joined the payroll of JP Morgan for a matter of millions after it was established that wreaking the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis did not pose an issue for the institution’s Corporate Social Responsibility commitments. One notes in passing the felicitous aura an Italian word can bring to a sentence in English, since a heart out of time with its time does precious little sense make.

Serious people take serious things seriously, however, and the writer is serious enough to allow reality to attempt to encroach on his argument.

And while it is true that the situation in Iraq since the 2003 invasion has gone from bad to appalling to better and, right at this moment, back to appalling, none of that should be the measure of the morality of the cause. Whatever about the presentation of the issues to the public, it is clear – for example from the Alastair Campbell diaries – that Tony Blair was motivated well in advance of the invasion by a desire to rid the world of its ugliest dictator. There are few who, when the argument is couched in these terms, can argue convincingly he was wrong.

Serious people can couch an argument in whatever terms they wish. So, if we couch the argument about Hitler’s invasion of Eastern Europe in terms of the need he saw to acquire food and natural resources for the use of the German people, we can argue convincingly that he was right. And even those who argue that he was wrong, well, they would need to view the fact that he was sincere in his desire as a mitigating circumstance. Couched in the terms proposed by John Waters, the deluded were always right.

But the well of popular opinion has become so contaminated on this issue it is almost impossible to be heard in Blair’s defence. Then again, perhaps it is precisely the intensity of the dislike he generates that speaks of Tony Blair’s strongest qualities: his willingness to adopt clear stances, make unpopular decisions and stand over them.

People are stupid. Only Serious People Not On The Internet can recognise that a person’s qualities are abstract properties, with no relation to what that person actually does. So the fact that Tony Blair’s strongest qualities by Serious people’s lights are qualities that one might also observe in Caligula and Pol Pot should not blind us to precisely how important those qualities are.

Apart from Northern Ireland, his role in bringing a moral gaze to bear on Sierra Leone, East Timor and Kosovo show Blair is a leader who stands head-and-torso above his contemporaries when it comes to courage and moral clarity.

Serious people know what a moral gaze looks like. Look at me. Look. at. me.

Facts are Facts

New Statesman – “I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it”

And it is the job of philosophers and intellectuals to engage in that ideological struggle. In other words, theory matters. Žižek tells me a story about a friend of his going to meet Noam Chomsky, the “most influential public intellectual” in America. “My friend told me Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don’t need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. You have to change the ideological background.
“I’m sorry,” Žižek says, ending the anecdote with a cackle. “I’m an old-fashioned continental European. Theory is sacred and we need it more than ever.”

Žižek comes out with an awful load of claptrap. I should know, I’ve read about 14 of his books. This is not to say that he’s entirely incapable of delivering useful insights, but they are mostly commonsensical, and I have often found myself wondering why, beyond the delight of stumbling across the odd good and often dirty joke, I have patiently traversed so much Hegelian-Lacanian bric-a-brac. I got into reading his books through an interest in Marxism and psychoanalysis, but I am not sure if he has anything really interesting to say about either. To be fair, he really has no truck with facts, and his references to anything that might actually have happened are processed in Hegelese. His latest work, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, proudly boasts a footnote that his account of the “Qarmatian republic” and the Zanj revolt ‘relies heavily upon the relevant Wikipedia entries; see in particular the entries on the “Quarmatians” and the “Zanj Rebellion”‘. Hamid Dabashi described Žižek’s recent intervention on Iran as ‘entirely spontaneous and impressionistic, predicated on as much knowledge about Iran as I have about the mineral composition of the planet Jupiter‘. In a recent interview I heard him say that his book Welcome To The Desert of The Real had managed to raise the ire of both Zionists and Arabs, the Socratic irony of which he seemed to enjoy, but did not seem to have taken into account the possibility that the book was racist toward both Jews and Arabs. Joseph Massad referred to Žižek’s ‘Zionist-inspired propagandistic claims that have no bearing on reality, namely that “Hitler is still considered a hero” in “most” Arab countries, and that The Elders of the Protocols of Zion and other anti-Semitic myths are found in Arab primary school textbooks’ and his ‘own anti-Semitism which manifests in reducing Judaism to the anti-Semitic notion of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition, and which identifies Jews anti-Semitically as “cosmopolitan”, is never clear to Žižek who projects it onto the Palestinians’. Chomsky, for whom Žižek regularly proclaims reserved admiration, does not escape Žižek’s ability to develop characterisations that bear no actual relation to reality, attributing to Chomsky the ‘biting remark that Obama is a white man blackened by a couple of hours of sun-tanning‘. Perhaps there is an elegant theoretical framework that serves to explicate this sort of thing and I am too thick to grasp it, but I have yet to come across it in Žižek’s work.

Cochonism

We studied Animal Farm at school, and part of our GCSE coursework was to write a continuation of it. I recall that lots of the kids in the class wrote accounts of how Snowball came back, pulled together all the other animals, and kicked Napoleon’s ass, and then all the animals lived happily ever after. I, on the other hand -oh jesus this is embarrassing- wrote a tortuous account of how things took a turn for the better when another pig -I can’t remember the name I assigned him- with a distinctive purple blotch on his ear introduced a series of liberalising reforms, including opening up lines of co-operation with other farms, and then all the animals lived happily after. This was around the time Russia was undergoing its neo-liberal shock therapy, seeing massive increases in poverty, organised criminality and capital flight, to which I must have been rather oblivious. I had rejected the embryonic Trotskyism of my classmates for…embryonic Jeffrey Sachsism. None of which is all that important, I fear. But it came to mind when I read this Martina Devlin piece this morning. I know you’re not supposed to take these things seriously, but what can I say, I’m a nidiot.

It made me wonder: how much of a latent inclination is there toward communism in this country? Devlin takes the pigs of AIB to task for operating according to the corrupt Stalinist insertion of ‘…but some are more equal to others’. In order for this criticism to work, the notion that ‘all animals are equal’ has to bear some sort of legitimacy. So if AIB are giving a pay rise of 3pc, then that is contrary to the principle that ‘all animals are equal’ because no animal should be receiving a pay rise. Not, of course, that I think Martina Devlin is a communist: far from it. Indeed, it is entirely in the ruling class interest, albeit in a blatantly stupid manner, to propose that all Irish citizens are equally responsible or equally affected in the jaws of recession-cum-depression. Because by proclaiming that there is equality where there is none, the effect is the consolidation of existing unequal relations. However, it is worth recognising that these demands on the part of ruling class interest for ‘equality’ are on account of the fact that lots of people are concerned with equality. A couple of weekends ago I was at a conference in which various people expressed frustration about the selfish nature of Irish people. But in the depths of this recession we are surrounded by verbiage about sharing the burden equally, acting in the common good, in a public spirited manner, and so on. If people were really only motivated by narrow self-interest, this sloganeering would have no traction. It is precisely because a substantial people are not generally selfish that so many spokespeople for ruling class interest can get away so shamelessly with all these appeals to equality, or the ‘national interest’. There is certainly a huge gap between egalitarian communism and the formal appearance of equality based solely on citizenship, and I do not see the country falling to the communists tomorrow. Nonetheless I think that notions such as ‘equality’ and the ‘national interest’ are being monopolised by ruling class lackeys (if you will pardon my Lenin), and are going uncontested at the minute, and there is an opportunity for fighting back on precisely these grounds.

Waiting In Hope

Yes, taking issue with what is essentially advertising copy for Aer Lingus is the activity of someone beset by reptiles of the mind, but still…

The quiet life in Andalusia – The Irish Times – Sat, Oct 17, 2009

It’s best not to be in a hurry in this part of Andalusia. Linguistically, the Spanish draw no distinction between waiting and hoping; esperando means either. When you know that, you know everything you need to know about the local character.

Is it true that linguistically the Spanish, and the Spanish-speaking population of the rest of the world draw no distinction between waiting and hoping? As they say in Andalusia: no. It is true that the verb ‘esperar’ can translate as either to wait, or to hope, or even to expect, but strangely enough the Spanish have this thing called context which allows them to draw the distinction. Actually, the distinction is only really needed for the purposes of someone who needs to translate the words back into their own language. Therefore it’s more accurate to say that they rarely need to draw a distinction between esperar in the senses of waiting and hoping just as they rarely need to draw a distinction between an elephant and a telephone. So if you are making off down the street with my sofa because I have not been keeping up with my debt repayments and I call out ¡Espere!, I am imploring you to wait, and I do so confident that you will not misinterpret this as an exhortation to hope. Now, when it comes to things like ‘esperando el autobus’, I have done a lot of this in Spain, and elsewhere, and I can attest that there is no greater an element of hope in this activity in Spain than there is anywhere else. Indeed, my experience of buses in Spain is that they tend to be a lot more reliable than those of, say, Bus Eireann. There are other things to be said here, like how the subjunctive mood may be a clue to the non-native speaker as to whether the intended meaning is ‘wait’ or ‘hope’, but I shall not bore you with these.

As well as some famous remarks about history, Marx’s 18th Brumaire makes a rather apposite remark in this regard: ‘the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue’. One of the consequences of translating things back into your mother tongue is that you can end up attaching salient features to particular words which have no salience for the native speaker. I remember sitting in a Spanish class and hearing someone remark about how delightful was the Spanish verb disfrutar -to enjoy- with its connotations of eating fruit. Well, it’s true that the origin of disfrutar has something to do with fruit (though not necessarily with the fruit of a plant), but the association itself does not indicate that when a Peruvian tells you he enjoyed the Randy Newman concert that his experience of the same was more inflected with the prior experience of the enjoyment of fruit than your own experience was. It may very well turn out that his experience was inflected with the prior experience of the enjoyment of fruit, but that would depend mostly on his taste for fruit. If he spent every waking hour devouring bananas and papayas, then it may well turn out that when he said ‘disfruté del concierto de Randy Newman’, the image of fruit loomed large in his mind and he picked this word instead of many others that might convey a sense of enjoyment, but I would surmise that this would be down to a coincidence rather than any general property attached to the meaning of the word disfrutar on the part of the average speaker.

So hopefully you can see how unfortunate it might be for the traveller suitably aroused by the promo article to arrive in Spain with the expectation that they will come across people who do not tell the difference between waiting and hoping. Let us hope they do not wind up in the waiting room of a casualty ward, lest their experience be inflected by a wholly unnecessary despair. My personal experience is that waiting times in casualty in Spain are considerably shorter than those in Ireland. And -shock- you do not have to pay. Which leads me on to the next sentence in the article.

Nonetheless, the bullfight, perhaps alone in Spanish society, always starts on time.

I would have edited this a bit, replacing ‘perhaps’ with ‘certainly not’. Where this idea comes from, I have no clue. It’s true, for example, that the evening meal in Spanish society starts late, but it only by the standards of the likes of people who associate the evening Angelus bells with the onset of dinner time. As to whether the bullfight always starts on time, I have no idea, having never attended one and no intention of doing so at any point in the future. Maybe the idea of the punctuality of the bullfight in opposition to all other things comes from the Lorca poem about the bullfight, La cogida y la muerte, which begins with

A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde

And then repeats a las cinco de la tarde -at five in the afternoon- on each alternate line. I would submit, hopefully uncontroversially, that Lorca’s primary preoccupation here -though he was fond of bullfighting (as a spectacle, I should stress: he was not a bullfighter himself) – was not with the striking punctuality of the bullfight in general, though I suppose that is a potential line of interpretation, if a rather dull one.