Britain's 'Clean Hands" Moment

British politics are at a ‘Clean Hands’ moment comparable to Italy circa 1992.

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Lucarelli introduces his De Luca trilogy with a fine story about interviewing a retired police sergeant who had served first in Mussolini’s OVRA, arresting anti-fascists and communists, then in the partisan police, arresting ex-fascists, then as a policeman in Italy’s Christian Democrat republic arresting former partisans. ‘And so on,’ up to 1981.

In fact Lucarelli was at the University of Bologna at this time, still researching a thesis (subsequently abandoned) on the police under Fascism pre ’43. But he had wandered somewhat off piste. A question came to mind: for whom did this chap vote?

‘I wanted to know if at least at some point he had been bothered about putting the handcuffs on someone, and instead he looked at me, slightly offended, and said, What’s that got to do with it? I’m a policeman.’
(Lucarelli: Nota di Carlo Lucarelli in Il commissario De Luca, 1990-1996)

That sense of a centre of gravity reappears during the second of the trilogy:

‘Look, I like my work. I’ve got it all in here. He tapped his head with the tip of one finger. And I think I’m good at it. But I lack experience. I took the police officer course when the armistice happened and I went immediately into the mountains with the partisans… The practical stuff I did alone. But it’s not enough. It won’t be enough very shortly because, yes, everything’s going to change. Perhaps there’ll be a revolution but the police, this much I know, will always be the same.’
(Lucarelli: L’estate torbida, 1991)

*

It might of course seem like trimming. It might be exactly that. But not always. Sometimes, ideally, there might be a loyalty to something higher which can unite the private person, his constancy, her self respect, with a social identity which perdures through all its changes.
What’s significant about Britain’s current parliamentary crisis is not that a significant number of MPs can now be seen to have been corrupt (that much isn’t surprising) but that the Fees Office had been drawn into that corruption, just as the intelligence services had been drawn into a different sort of corruption during the preparations for the invasion of Iraq under Cardinal Blair.
Indeed it has been the marvellous achievement of New Labour, heading towards a British version of Italy circa 1992, continuing the damage wrought by Thatcherism, to have destroyed much of the independence of the Civil Service, to have damaged gravely, unacceptably, the freedom of action of the Judiciary, and to have expunged almost completely any notion of politics as a set of actors, actions and beliefs that together constitute what we used to call a vocation and not something comparable to, say, the activities of some of the more questionable figures in the business community with whose salaries politicians' incomes are now, apparently, meant to be in competition.

To have destroyed, in short, not only independence and self respect at a personal level (and thus in the case of individual MPs) but also constancy and integrity at a social level, which is the level at which institutions and those who make up those institutions have to function.

Keeping Cheerful

Ci ragiono e canto contains the splendid song Ho visto un re (words by or adapted by Dario Fo; music by Paolo Ciarchi, best known for Piccolo uomo and now, I believe, a noise artist, and/or Enzo Jannacci):

I saw a king
a king who wept, still seated in the saddle.
He wept so many tears, so many tears that
even the horse got wet. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.
The emperor had taken from him one fine castle
the crafty sod
out of thirty two of them he’d owned. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.

The song, of course, goes on. A king, a bishop, a rich man, an emperor and a cardinal have all of them been ‘half ruined’. (The bishop indeed is so upset that he bites the hand of his sacristan.) Fo then mentions the peasant. He’s been cheated out of his chicken, his turkey, his wife, his farmstead, his son who’s gone for military service, even his pig. So he’s been completely ruined.
But does the peasant weep? Not a bit of it. He laughs. Because it’s the duty of the poor to keep cheerful, to avoid upsetting wealthy folk.

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Rowan Williams appeared to take a similar line in yesterday’s Times. Britain’s MPs have suffered enough. They’ve even sacked the Speaker, rather in the manner of the bishop biting the hand of his unfortunate sacristan. Enough humiliation. We must move on.

‘We must move on’ is painfully New Labour. Indeed there’s a thesis to be written (using Talmy’s Force Dynamics) on how New Labour likes to use ‘speed’ whenever it lacks direction, which is often. Here, though, it belies something else. Whilst Dr Williams purports to solicit restraint when attacking dodgy MPs, he actually seems more confident in making the perfectly valid point that public service is (or ought to be) about something more than rule based behaviour and that the something he has in mind includes (or ought to include) the institution of a higher morality of some sort.

And yet he misses the vital point, which is that the Great Expenses Fiasco with all its absurdities, its lying and its cheating is but a symptom of a very much greater corruption, that of representative democracy itself. So his thesis becomes a purely local one about cleaning up peculation, about how a regular audit by nanny (‘Turn out your pockets this minute, Master McNulty!’) won’t solve everything and not about more explicitly political issues, such as:

• how Parliament itself now fails miserably to represent the electoral will of this country. In 2005, for example, 22% of those eligible to vote supported the present government, despite its large majority. This was the worst result for any single party government since at least World War I
• how the Executive now retains almost total power within the parliamentary process, so that the views of the opposition can generally be ignored
• how the Whip systems, the Committee system and the craven acceptance of both of these by backbench MPs (who now function either as lobby fodder or as deracinated local ombudsmen or as both; hence the two homes) means that reams of fatuous and ill considered legislation are passed without scrutiny and, frequently, without comment
• how, in more general terms, principle has now become mere policy, consumables to be sold to a supposedly gullible public for whom New Labour has contempt; means have been severed from ends; political labels have become brands, power has been exiled into bureaucracy, and so on.

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But if representative democracy is to mean anything, then it must be about something very like a sort of mutual inspiration: of the leaders by the people and of the people by their leaders. Whereas what we have is mutual contempt. We may or may not want to solve this. And if we do, it can’t be by keeping cheerful lest MPs should get upset.

Anger may embarrass many people, but it is the surest sign that our democracy isn’t yet dead.

We need to become angrier still. And angrier, of course, about still more. Not just about bent cabinet ministers, duck islands and moats.

The Persistence of Technology

E Nesbit on how technology captures subjectivity.

‘There's a dreadful law here - it was made by mistake, but there it is - that if any one asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.’

(E Nesbit: The Magic City)

Manufactured Fiction

'The environment is so full of television, party political broadcasts and advertising campaigns that you hardly need to do anything. We're just drowning under manufactured fiction.'
(J G Ballard, who died on Sunday, in The Observer, September 2002)

'I want to go to East Grinstead'

Gertrude Stein described the experience of coming from Oakland in these terms:

'What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.'
(Gertrude Stein: Everybody's Autobiography)

When Augé (in Un ethnologue dans le metro) describes the non-space of the Metro as 'the collective without the celebration, and the solitude without the isolation', he too is reflecting how it feels to have a form without substance, to find a label attached to some sort of empty cabinet, to be in a situation where there is no experience (or no 'there') there, where the extensional, the denotative, seems to be the only option because the connotative, the intensional, is either denied or is suppressed or has gone missing.

If modernism proceeds, typically, by finding ways to 'make it new', as a revolt against or overturning of tradition, whatever 'tradition' means, then one question raised by these comments is whether this particular fish is rotting from the head inwards and downwards or outwards from within. Whether, in terms of one of the false dilemmas posed by modernism, form takes precedence over content, an endless sequence of new moulds into which something is poured and thus reshaped, or whether content pushes form. (It scarcely matters here that form and content are actually indivisible; it's how we think of them that counts. And, of course, there are parallels between 'content' and movement, or grass roots politics, on the one hand and between 'form' and the avant garde, or party structure, on the other.)

Varèse seems clear enough, at least at first, that content pushes form:

'Form is a result - the result of a process. Each of my works discovers its own form. I have never tried to fit any of my compositions into any known container.'
(Edgard Varèse: Rhythm, Form and Content)

So too is Creeley. 'Form is never more than an extension of content'; this in a letter to Olson. Olson quoted it in Projective Verse. Creeley later expanded on it as follows to make poetry analogous to something naturally occurring:

'Form is what happens. It's the fact of things in the world, however they are. So that form in that way is simply the presence of any thing.

[...]

'The what of what was being said gained the how of what was being said, and the how (the mode) then became what I called form.'
(In Martin Lammon: From an interview with Linda Wagner, in Written in Water, Written in Stone)

In fact, both the proposed relationship between form and content and their perceived relationship with the natural are ambivalent.

For Zukofsky, for example, 'Poetry convinces not by argument but by the form it creates to carry its content.' (Zukofsky: Test 52, from A Test of Poetry, 1948). However, that's because he conceives of poetry as a sort of totalising procedure in which 'content' changes its meaning to become poetry's organising forms just as the 'content' of science is a formalisation of the world with which it engages, which is somehow formless without it:

'[I]t appears that the scientific definition of poetry can be based on nothing less than the world, the entire humanly known world.

'Like the theories of science which are valid because they explain most, this definition will be valid inasmuch as it will be comprehensive.'
(Zukofsky: Poetry / for my son when he can read, 1946)

Which is why, in the spirit of Zukofsky, Ron Silliman can say in a curious formulation, about the work of Alan Davies, that 'the content of form is anger' and of Zukofsky himself that there are two alternative readings: 'Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility' on the one hand and 'Zukofsky as horizon or limit' on the other. Whilst for his own part Silliman himself claims to use form ('The purpose of the poem, like that of any act, is to change the world') as a technique to break down, a sort of exemplary act, his own cognitive limits:

'When I wrote the first volume of Ketjak in 1974, I used a systematic methodology to break down certain habits of mind that prevented me from focusing on the sentence as the point of perception.'(Ron Silliman: Wild Form)

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'A book is a machine to think with,' according to I A Richards. (Richards: Principles of Literary Criticism, 1926) Williams too, conceives of poetry in these industrial terms rather than those of Nature:

'To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.

'Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.'

(William Carlos Williams: Introduction to The Wedge)

But in fact what Zukofsky and Williams both represent is actually quite a 'tame' view of form, in which the world is codified but somehow not engaged with except with rubber gloves. (An earlier post on technology may give a flavour of what I mean.) For Zukofsky 'form' implies a sort of conceptual syntax, permitting no unorganised conception and no excess of the natural over conception. For Williams it's more explicit: nothing is 'sentimental', 'ill defined' or 'redundant'; everything becomes part of an idealised mechanics, just as the ideal of 'science' hovers over Zukofsky.

Of course it's Kerouac (hence the title of Silliman's piece) who represents (quite self consciously) what 'wild' means in this context. But Kerouac's rhetoric is solipsistic, even bombastic. Indeed there's a self contradiction. What ought to come from the future or from outside or from the natural ('discovery') actually comes from the past and from within, from the confected: 'every image and every memory'. So that the encounter isn't, in the end, with the alterity of, say, an undiscovered wilderness but with his own 'exploding' mind. As with a tantrum in a playpen there's a reaching out towards totality, for a freedom of speech that denies others' freedom not to listen, but at the same time an awareness of limitation which functions for Kerouac rather as shame does for Levinas:

'What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story... into realms of revealed Picture... wild form, man, wild form. Wild form's the only form holds what I have to say - my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory.... I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know.'

(Jack Kerouac: letter reproduced in J C Holmes: Nothing More to Declare)

*

Of course the dilemma I posed at the start (which comes first, form or content?) and its essential absurdity may still seem somewhat abstract. And yet if one thinks about composers things get a good deal clearer. Consider, for example, the apparent opposition between Milton Babbitt's total serialism, theoretically total control, and Cage's indeterminacy. Whereas for Babbitt form arises out of the rigorous construction of content, for Cage the content (which is often something quite unknown) is invited to participate, a revelation of Sound corresponding to Kerouac's Picture, through the rigorous prior construction of 'arbitrary' formal constraints.

*

And so to Ayckbourn, which might well seem at first a very odd leap to have made.
But Ayckbourn's conceptual approach resembles that of Cage at least in this respect, that he uses form, a priori, rather as Cage does, to compel the arrival of results for which the corresponding causes don't exist and thus to break the discursive, organising syntax of what we think of as reality.

And yet this resemblance masks a sharp distinction.

Augé describes what interests him about the Metro as 'the play between the subway map - which is there, and is imposed on us - and the various ways we find to move through it'. Ayckbourn's characters are likewise at odds with his plots. They live with what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the 'emotional residue' of unnatural boundaries. They struggle to get free of them and, in the end, remain imprisoned together by what is randomly positioned, orthogonal or parallel relative to them but which is emphatically not them at all. When, for example, Tom punches Norman in Table Manners (one of The Norman Conquests) it's by way of protecting Annie; however Tom has misunderstood. When Doug knocks Vic into the swimming pool in Man of the Moment, indirectly causing his death, he ought to be taking revenge. In fact, it's out of a sort of knee-jerk chivalry, like an emotional Groundhog Day. And so on.

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Whereas, and this is a major distinction, the thrust of Zukofsky, Williams, Cage et al is to open up new frontiers (progress: the impulse to colonise and coerce, to 'civilise' through the operation of boundaries or of science, to deny the idea of the ruin) Ayckbourn deals with what Benjamin calls the 'refuse of history' and what Freud called the 'refuse of the phenomenological world', that which is left behind by such constructed objects as rugs, board games and swimming pools:

'Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.'

(Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)

'... to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress [...] Its founding concept is not progress but actualisation.'

(Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, N2,2)

'Where the categorical network is so closely woven that much of that which lies beneath is concealed by conventions of opinion, including scientific opinion, then eccentric phenomena which have not yet been incorporated by this network at times, take on an unexpected gravity.'

(T W Adorno: On the Logic of the Social Sciences)

Whereas Cage's approach is inclusive, bringing into account what the attention would have overlooked simply by widening the scope, even though in practice someone of a later generation like Silliman behaves as a sort of gatekeeper, drawing a Manichean distinction between the ridiculously named 'post avant' and those he dismisses grandly as the 'School of Quietiude', the effect of Ayckbourn's stagecraft is quite otherwise and exclusive: aspects of experience and motivation are cut off arbitrarily rather as Peter Pan's shadow is cut off by the closing window.

Thus Jack's morality in A Small Family Business has a purely denotative quality, it acts as an empty label since he crumbles like the rest. So too the play's attempt to reconcile the Thatcherite principles of individual greed and family solidarity, which excludes Jack's daughter, Samantha. Likewise Vic in Man of the Moment, whose self reinvention has been only of his image in the media. And Nerys, Vic's original victim and now Doug's wife through the exigencies of the plot, who has been excluded from the play altogether.

*

In bringing exclusion into the mechanics of the plays, in other words, Ayckbourn writes not as the victor or about the loser but rather out of the state of defeat, out of abjection, out of the dream and reality of Oakland, or rather of East Grinstead, less heroic even than Hastings, not as one of the tramplers but out of what has been divided, broken, trampled and left behind as progress goes on progressing.

So maybe what Benjamin said of Baudelaire could find some relevance here:

'That which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to those ruins...

'Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside; Baudelaire evokes it from within.'

(Benjamin: The Arcades Project, J56,1 and J56,2)

Three Views of Duplicity

Alan Ayckbourn on corruption:

'The human mind, left to its own devices, can usually justify any code of behaviour it chooses to suit circumstances. Beware!'
(Ayckbourn: programme note to A Small Family Business)

Gordon Brown on the behaviour of Damian McBride, a man he personally employed, whilst Chancellor and as Prime Minister, for more than ten years:

'I have said all along that when I saw this first I was very angry indeed. I think the most important thing we do is reassure people everything is being done to clean up politics in our country.'
(Gordon Brown: statement in Glasgow 16 April 2009)

Barack Obama's Nuremberg defence of those who carried out torture in Guantánamo:

'This administration has made it clear from day one that it will not condone torture ... those who carried out their duties ... in good faith ... will not be subject to prosecution.'
(Barack Obama: statement accompanying release of CIA memos 16 April 2009)

Discrepancy, Surplus and Rhythm

Johnson's rebuttal of Berkley's immaterialism was material enough: he stubbed his toe, a demonstration that reality and what Berkley thought about reality were discrepant.

But what about the hurt that stubbing causes? Why do toddlers complain (about, say, a bump on the knee) when the hurt itself has faded? Perhaps they're inventing memory, developing a sense of time in all its passing and perdurance: the hurt received back then versus the remedy just now delivered; what you thought was there versus what actually is there, and so on.

I quoted this from Scurati once before:

'Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn't matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

This variant comes from Wu Ming:

'We are on the summit of time, where the answer precedes the question, the effect precedes the cause, death precedes birth.

'You had to climb this hill to understand the journey you had taken.'
(Wu Ming: Manituana)

But time is also rhythm.

Lazzarato describes (in Videofilosofia) how Bergson distinguishes between, on the one hand, time as perceived by the senses and, on the other, time as conceived by the intellect. There is more 'reality' in sensation, according to Bergson, and that 'surplus' of reality in perception is to be sought, according to Nietzsche, within the body. He then traces the whole thing back to an Aristotelian sense of time extensively measuring the movement that is in Nature (in other words a cosmology) versus a neo-Platonic view of time as intension, as measuring out the movement of the soul.

In Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno the breathing of Zeno's dying father has a fretful quality which Zeno imitates 'almost unconsciously', before affording himself pauses which he hopes to pass on to his patient. The rhythm of the father's dying breaths seems to become part of the room 'from that point and for a long, long time after that.' In fact what Svevo seems to be describing here is the sort of entrainment whereby memory develops as a sort of felt persistence.

In a related passage Zeno plays the violin:

'Even the lowest sort of being, once he knows what three, four and six note figures are, knows how to pass between them with the same rhythmical exactness as his eye knows how to pass from one set of notes to the next. With me, though, once I've played one of these figures, it sticks to me and will not let me go again, so that it gets mixed up with the figure following and deforms it. In order to put the notes in the right place I have to mark time both with my feet and with my head, and so much for nonchalance, for serenity, so much for music. Music that comes from an organism that's in balance both is itself the time that it both creates and exhausts.'
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

And here, finally, for good measure, are some quotations from Sapienza in Onda, the Rome section of the Anomalous Wave, 18 March 2009:

'We have entered a new era. Today we can say this unambiguously, without prevarication. The recession is concrete reality: the government doesn't doubt it: police against the students, police against dissenters, police and baton charges against those who won't pay for this crisis!

'The Wave isn't dead. The Wave isn't some memory of youth. The Wave is alive and it doesn't intend to stop. The Wave causes fear.'