humour: media / politics

[vimothy]

Too bad about them Injuns, eh?

It's not the same issue, mate.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Sorry, what was the original question again?

Something like "Banksy: what's the point?", AFAIR.

 

[vimothy]

WTF - Am I on drugs? Have we just segued into an episode of the Invisibles here?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm sure the last time I looked at this thread your reponse was "something about Banksy, AFAIR". What's happened there?

Ahaha, I wanted to end on the Banksy note, so I deleted it and reposted, although it's all gone tits to buggery now.

Yes, them Injuns is a different issue, but it's a bit of a big one to gloss over.

 

[vimothy]

Yes, them Injuns is a different issue, but it's a bit of a big one to gloss over.

I wasn't glossing over it - I wasn't mentioning it at all because it's not relevant to what I was saying.

 

[Gavin]

Actually, I thought you were the statist and I was in favour of minimal government and private property. Maybe I was wrong.

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I was a statist. And I wasn't criticizing homeownership, just pointing out that ruling class methods of pacification adjusted to new situations, the welfare state being among them. Obviously the ruling class sees little need for it any more, although some token rhetoric about universal health care coverage will apparently loom large in the 2008 election.

The original question had to do with the function of humor, especially in the media: whether it serves as an effective critique of power or whether it simply serves the status quo. It's located where these things usually are, in the first post of the thread.

 

[vimothy]

The original question had to do with the function of humor, especially in the media: whether it serves as an effective critique of power or whether it simply serves the status quo. It's located where these things usually are, in the first post of the thread.

Ah, humour - and here we see an alledged example of the same...

 

[vimothy]

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I was a statist. And I wasn't criticizing homeownership, just pointing out that ruling class methods of pacification adjusted to new situations, the welfare state being among them. Obviously the ruling class sees little need for it any more, although some token rhetoric about universal health care coverage will apparently loom large in the 2008 election.

It's hardly a question of "need", is it? Because if the state could exert more control, it would. The real problem with the welfare state is not that the masonic powers that be see no further need for it relative to their programme of neo-liberal imperialist expansion, but that it is not affordable or economically sensible, in its present form (although, there is a caveat to that, which is that plenty of the members of the ruling class disagree with me).

The original question had to do with the function of humor, especially in the media: whether it serves as an effective critique of power or whether it simply serves the status quo.

Obviously, it depends.

What was the poli sci thing all about?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I wasn't glossing over it - I wasn't mentioning it at all because it's not relevant to what I was saying.

Yeah, fair enough, I was just being a bit arsey.

 

[vimothy]

Yeah, fair enough, I was just being a bit arsey.

Scafe

 

[Mr. Tea]

Scafe

WTF? Am I on drugs? etc. etc.

 

[Slothrop]

This kind of thing got played endlessly here in debates over "strategy" and "mismanagement," instead of people pointing out that a) occupations always involve violence, death, and atrocities which those crowing for invasion should have accounted for if they are the least bit responsible for their views;

This really comes out when you get a 'scandal' like Abu Ghraib and pretty much everyone (not just the hawks) runs around wringing their hands and saying of course we've got to root out these bad apples so that the next time we send a bunch of underprepared squaddies to try to control a hostile country in the face of sustained and ruthlessly violent resistance everything will be absolutely peachy.

 

[Guybrush]

I do think that there is a lot of truth in this ("nothing is true and everything is permitted") but I also think that Vimothy has correctly identified a paradox in that art in a dictatorship is art against that dictatorship and towards a society in which when achieved art will ultimately have less power.

I think Vimothy’s argument is tenuous, though. First of all, often what a revolutionary group is fighting for is not democracy but power (think of the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq). Moreover, art need not be less powerful because it’s sanctioned, as it were, by the state. The works of Bach, Giotto, and thousands of others are a testimony to this.

If there is a lowest common denominator linking most great artists it seems to be some kind of zeal: spiritual zeal, political zeal (which could be said to be the same thing), madness (also kind of zeal inducing, arguably), or zeal for something else (money/fame/glamour/whathaveyou). Tentatively, one could presuppose that different kinds of zeal create different kinds of art, and that what some people in the West are bemoaning is actually the loss of a specific kind of art (and thus the zeal that engenders it). What I’m getting at, once again, is that I think the argument over democracy vs [other political system] is slightly off target. More important is to look at which societal conditions/attitudes/currents create ‘fine art’. I actually happen to think that all-out permissiveness (I was close to writing excessive) is detrimental to the creation of ‘fine art’, but then again, its a salubrious principle in pretty much all other spheres of society, so I’m hardly against it on a fundemantal level. Still, it has its downsides.

 

[Gavin]

I think Vimothy’s argument is tenuous, though. First of all, often what a revolutionary group is fighting for is not democracy but power (think of the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq). Moreover, art need not be less powerful because it’s sanctioned, as it were, by the state. The works of Bach, Giotto, and thousands of others are a testimony to this.

If there is a lowest common denominator linking most great artists it seems to be some kind of zeal: spiritual zeal, political zeal (which could be said to be the same thing), madness (also kind of zeal inducing, arguably), or zeal for something else (money/fame/glamour/whathaveyou). Tentatively, one could presuppose that different kinds of zeal create different kinds of art, and that what some people in the West are bemoaning is actually the loss of a specific kind of art (and thus the zeal that engenders it). What I’m getting at, once again, is that I think the argument over democracy vs [other political system] is slightly off target. More important is to look at which societal conditions/attitudes/currents create ‘fine art’. I actually happen to think that all-out permissiveness (I was close to writing excessive) is detrimental to the creation of ‘fine art’, but then again, its a salubrious principle in pretty much all other spheres of society, so I’m hardly against it on a fundemantal level. Still, it has its downsides.

Yeah, I think with the state-sanctioned art you talk about, there's still the spiritual zeal (I'm not sure if I'm ok with zeal, but we can run with it). Maybe even a historical zeal? The idea that, like a hereditary monarchy, this art will last in the annals of history? Might be rambling at this point... Anyway the Lem excerpt references the decline of spiritual zeal -- once God was gone, it made a lot of art seem beside the point.

Re: permissiveness, I agree it's detrimental to "fine" art (maybe no great loss), but also to political expression, and another "source of zeal" perhaps. And I think the permissiveness is oversold -- we can have whatever color iPod we want, we can have premarital sex, but there's ever greater regulation of public, and even private conduct (John Kerry event tasering again, increased surveillance esp. of minority populations and youth).

There's something soul-sapping about a high-turnover ahistorical culture as well (your important work will be forgotten when the next product cycle comes around next week), but I don't have the time to flesh it out right now... "All that is solid melts into air"...

 

[Guybrush]

Yes, you are right, the supposed permissiveness is pretty curtailed in practise. Excuse me for posting this quotation again, but it’s right on the money:

Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art's sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bourgeoisie itself became decadent—once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom—Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe.

This nicely explains why the egghead straw man is still so common even though he is all but extinct in reality.

 

[IdleRich]

"I think Vimothy’s argument is tenuous, though. First of all, often what a revolutionary group is fighting for is not democracy but power (think of the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq). Moreover, art need not be less powerful because it’s sanctioned, as it were, by the state. The works of Bach, Giotto, and thousands of others are a testimony to this."

Well, in fairness Vimothy said that it was a struggle towards either a different dictatorship or a democracy. The problem is that a different dictatorship is not normally any better than the previous one and a democracy (going by what Gavin said) reduces the power of art. You still have the paradox of art that is in favour of an improvement (whatever that means) working towards its own powerlessness.

"If there is a lowest common denominator linking most great artists it seems to be some kind of zeal: spiritual zeal, political zeal (which could be said to be the same thing), madness (also kind of zeal inducing, arguably), or zeal for something else (money/fame/glamour/whathaveyou)."

I broadly agree with that (with a number of caveats of course as usual), in fact I started writing something similar earlier but it got deleted and I never re-typed it because it was a bit confused or lacking in focus or maybe I just wasn't sure it was right.
Basically, what I said was the general idea of the power that art has when struggling against a dictatorship might be a kind of a macro version of the idea of the artist (or band or author or whatever) doing their best work when they are struggling in their garret rather than when old and bloated by success and cocaine. You might argue that the poor artist on the dole is having an artificial resistance manufactured for them (not necessarily explicitly like in the film Happiness where the struggling writer says something like "It's not fair, why wasn't I raped as a child") and that this resistance allows them the seriousness which Zhao spoke of in his first post.
Obviously there are lots of counter-examples to this and I don't think it tells anything like the whole story but it may be part of it. Like I said though, it's a bit confused.

 

[nomadologist]

Well if K-Punk wrote about it it must be true (see also a million other sources of name-dropped obedient Big Other pseudo-philosophy).

Obviously, that's not what I meant--I was simply posing the question, since I've read K-punks blog posts about this alleged anti-intellectual pose amongst some of the most highly educated people in the world, and I wondered if other British people could confirm or deny this claim.

As for what Mixed Biscuits claims in his reply--in my opinion, it's intellectually dishonest to refuse to give credit to thinkers who have already written VOLUMES on the topics you're debating, while citing their self-same arguments or classic opposition to their arguments as part of your debate strategy or personal opinion. Especially if you've read their work extensively.

Simply bringing up a pertinent issue raised by someone else in a book is not "name-dropping." Name-dropping is bringing up a name without referring to the significance of that person to the topic at hand, and only as a reference point that is meant to stand in for an argument.

As far as I can see, no one here has done that in this thread.

 

[gek-opel]

Aye, it's all true.

Who is 'k-punk' and what would k-punk know? Even if s/he did have some experience of either university, how can s/he generalise about the tens of thousands of people who pass through them? Has s/he not heard about colleges like Wadham (Oxford) or King's (Cambridge)? They're absolutely packed with name-dropping, left-leaning wannabe intellos (one of my friends is at King's).

Even if your thesis were true (that ppl at Oxbridge pretend to be anti-intellectual), it is still the case that most students there actually are more intellectual than at any of the other universities in the UK, in that they have read more (see performances on University Challenge), are generally more intelligent (some greatly so), are competitive and goal-centred and are given more work to do than anywhere else (Oxf: 12 essays in 8 weeks to defend 1-1 or 2-1 vs world-leading experts).

Re debating styles, what might be believed by many Oxbridge students is that less intelligent people name-drop more in debate than the more intelligent as doing so gives their arguments a ready-made structure and weight - which is easier than fashioning persuasive points on the fly (which skills the Oxbridge tutorial system attempts to develop). I don't remember Union debates involving much name-dropping either.

Many Oxbridge students might well be averse to heavy name-dropping (as I obv am) as it betrays preparation and admits an intellectual debt to others, preferring the implied self-sufficiency of improvised argument (the narcissism of 'effortless superiority'). On a more prosaic note, name-dropping and other excesses of referencing disrupt the flow of an argument, as your interlocutor wastes time vainly trying to retrieve information about GodknowswhatobscureFrenchthinker from memory rather than following your logic.

So, to some extent, I agree with k-punk, but with important reservations: some Oxbridge students are closetly intellectual anti-'intello's (which stance is itself an attentuation of the wider British mistrust of 'intellectuals') while others would fit right in with the handful of Essex students who were set on assuming an 'intellectual' persona.

PS 'Gym class hero'? Is s/he thinking of the right side of the Atlantic?

My personal recollection of Oxford (Christ Church college, if we want to be specific, but I knew plenty of people attending the other colleges) was that most of the people there are perfectly intelligent, few of them are intellectual. Most are as you say competitive and goal-centred, but these are not to my mind necessary components of an intellectual mindset (rather the perfect conditions for a hyper-productive capitalist work force). Above all else there was a terror of applying anything that might be learnt in the class room (or God forbid- outside of it) to your own life, to allow it to interrupt the calm flow from school to university, from university to city job.

 

[mistersloane]

Obviously, that's not what I meant--I was simply posing the question, since I've read K-punks blog posts about this alleged anti-intellectual pose amongst some of the most highly educated people in the world, and I wondered if other British people could confirm or deny this claim.

Could you point to the posts in particular nomad? I'll be able to give a more reasoned response if I know what they've written, I've skirted through the blog, erm, y'know.

 

[IdleRich]

"Obviously, that's not what I meant--I was simply posing the question, since I've read K-punks blog posts about this alleged anti-intellectual pose amongst some of the most highly educated people in the world, and I wondered if other British people could confirm or deny this claim."

OK, fair enough, it was the mention of the article to dismiss what Mixed_Biscuits said that I objected to, not the article itself.
As to the value of the K-Punk piece, I read it before (can't seem to find it now though I'm afraid Mr Sloane) and I found that parts of it at least (ignoring the wilder, more speculative claims) seemed to accurately reflect my girlfriend's experience (she is doing a phd at Oxford at the moment although she's not much of a gym hero), so much so in fact that I sent her the piece. Maybe that's not quite the full story though, the people from her course (philosophy) that I've met I would describe as, in the main, very interested in their subject for its own sake (whether that makes them an intellectual to satisfy Gek I don't know). That's certainly all they talk about if you go to the pub with them. On the other hand, there is another Oxford type, that really is, despite Oxford's attempts to change it, overwhelmingly from public school and happily on that trajectory that Gek identified from Eton/Milfield to Oxford/Cambridge to City/Civil Service, pausing to get drunk and show their arses every now and again on the way.
What subject did you study Gek? I wonder if that may influence your experience. It may also be different at graduate/post-graduate level.