Logophobia

I have banished all actual words from recent work, even in places where it would naturally appear in the image, something which became a virtual monomania with the WIP 'Ozymandias', as pictorial signs took the place of labels and names.

Wordless story-telling has its own tradition, from Lynd Ward to Eric Drooker. Everything has to be shown by the image, not told by the text. Every mediocre piece of fiction will tell the reader the story, rather than giving them the experience of the events. Having words within my images, in speech bubbles or captions, feels like a cheat, a cop-out, a failure to trust the image.

But Goya's integral titles to Los Caprichos show that text can be used in juxtaposition to image, not to explain the image, but to problematise or jolt the image into a more complex frame.

Words have been my professional stock-in-trade for three decades. I know too many of them and too much about them to believe they are a transparent tool for communication. Words always, in some form or manner, seek to persuade the reader or listener, of the truth of a description or argument or narrative. An image without a slogan to accompany it can, I think, claim no such authority for itself. Its manner of persuasion does not employ the means by which opinions are articulated, laws are passed, sentences handed down.

So I am still strongly disinclined to incorporate verbiage at any point within the image. Even one word absurd labels contains and captures the image beyond anything I would wish to happen.

Government Haircuts

The North Korean government has issued haircut guidance for its citizens and chosen 28 hairstyles it deems 'appropriate' for members of the single-party state. Photos of the 28 haircuts recommended by the totalitarian regime (pictured below) have been issued to salons around the country. The cuts were chosen for being comfortable and resistant to Western influences.

Married women are allowed shorter hair, but unmarried women have to keep their hair longer. Old men are allowed to let their hair grow up to 7cm, but younger men are urged to get their hair cut every 15 days.

The state is mother.
The state is father.
The state is barber.

Sadie Hennessy: Riffing on Englishness

Touring the by-ways of the interwebtubes (in this case in search of chocolate elephants) I became distracted by an image of classic gallows wit, Sadie Hennessy's stick of seaside rock with 'Gary Glitter' apparently printed through it. Part of her Strange Hungers exhibition, it has that lovely uncomfortable combination of being clever and dirty, funny and nasty. The press release for the exhibition states that she:

creates hybrid objects & images which are both comfortably familiar and deeply unsettling. She operates within a cultural framework of ‘Englishness’ and explores the idea of nostalgia, and more pertinently, the construct of ‘faux nostalgia’ i.e. the yearning for a time that never actually existed.

 Modified found objects are transformed into provocative artifacts whose meanings are formed from their cultural resonances within English 'low' culture, its language and referents. As such, these objects take on a political inference in which their humour, formed of incongruity or ironic juxtaposition, is central.

In other words, she is able to say something serious precisely because she can make the viewer laugh.

State Lies: 'Active Norm Management'

Extracts from a paper by the American Institute of Biological Sciences entitled 'Social Norms and Global Environmental Challenges' (available ahead of print edition of BioScience in March 2013), my emboldening:

Some have argued that progress on these problems can be made only through a concerted effort to change personal and social norms. They contend that we must, through education and persuasion, ensure that certain behaviors become ingrained as a matter of personal ethics....Substantial numbers of people will have to alter their existing behaviors to address this new class of global environmental problems. Alternative approaches are needed when education and persuasion alone are insufficient. Policy instruments such as penalties, regulations, and incentives may therefore be required to achieve significant behavior modification.

[Scientists have the tools to have a hand in] government policies intended to alter choices and behaviors [such as] active norm management, changing the conditions influencing behaviors, financial interventions, and regulatory measures. Each of these policy instruments potentially influences personal and social norms in different ways and through different mechanisms. Each also carries the danger of backfiring, which is often called a boomerang effect in the literature—eroding compliance and reducing the prevalence of the desired behaviors and the social norms that support those behaviors....Some have argued that regulations are inherently coercive and cannot or should not exceed implied levels of public permission for such regulations. An alternative viewpoint is that governments can and even should move beyond existent levels of public permission in order to shift norms, allowing public sentiment to later catch up with the regulation.

Fines can be an effective way to alter behavior, in part because they signal the seriousness with which society treats the issue....A carbon tax might...prove effective even in the face of near-term opposition. What needs to be assessed is the possibility that behaviors and values would coevolve in such a way that a carbon tax - or other policy instrument that raises prices, such as a cap-and-trade system - ultimately comes to be seen as worthy, which would therefore allow for its long-term effectiveness.

Goya, Los Caprichos No. 23

Each of the government interventions can influence both personal and social norms, although they do so through different mechanisms. Only social norm management directly targets norms. Choice architecture, financial instruments, and regulations can all alter social norms by causing people to first change their behaviors and then shift their beliefs to conform to those behaviors.”

Subtext: the scientists propose arousing the concept of cognitive dissonance in the minds of people in order to guide the herd towards 'pro-environmental' conformist behaviours, employing what they regard as 'universal' 'norms of conformity and cooperation' to manufacture compliance with a political project. And, for the purposes of this argument, any 'issue' or behaviour can substitute for pro-environmentalist conformity.

The group of scientists involved in this publication include two Nobel Prize winners, economist Kenneth Arrow and political scientist Elinor Ostrom, as well as behavioural scientists, mathematicians, biologists, and population scientists, the most well-known of whom are Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen C. Daily, so these are not nonentites. Alongside the debasing of honest science, which cannot survive any alignment with the ambitions of the state, this is a honey-worded urging towards the hastening of acceptance of increased governmental control of the contents of the minds of the masses. This collection of prominent scientists asserts that 'government is uniquely obligated to locate the common good and formulate its policies accordingly', while expressing confidence that their recommendations 'can be carried out in a way that abides by the principles of representative democracy, including transparency, fairness, and accountability'.

Ostensibly intelligent people really ought to know better. Not once in the entire report does it occur to them that moving beyond public consent, with the full weight of the state behind that move, might result in something a little uglier, a little more punitive, when the outliers of state-sanctioned belief systems kick back and cling to their heresies.

Aphorism #2

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

                                                            Thomas Jefferson

The Leaning Tower of Babel (a)

The etiology of multiple languages...or a lesson in limiting imagination?

Genesis 11:1-9 (King James' Version)

11 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

² And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
³ And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
⁴ And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
⁵ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
⁶ And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
⁷ Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
⁸ So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
⁹ Therefore is the name of it called Babel*; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

* LeBalbel = Hebrew word for confusion, jumble

The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865)

First came the Flood, then the confounding of uppity humanity, who, meant to get down to the business of repopulating the world, set about building a stairway to the heavens. 'Let us make us a name', the survivors declared, and a tower to reach into heaven, faced with a deity who might at any moment sweep the earth clean of them again. Human ingenuity, that pesky free will clause in the contract, allowed them to imagine a tower to heaven, to collaborate and engineer it into existence. And a deity whose unsettled pets are teaming up and threatening to turn up on his doorstep recognises that now nothing will be restrained from them. Whatever they might imagine, they have the capacity to try, as fancy and reason are married together in an act that can be construed as rebellion or resistance, according to your will.

'Wise' masters & 'stupid' slaves

Abstruse debates about free will and determinism might seem to be merely 'academic' (in the perjorative sense) in nature, until it enters the pointy end of public policy and social engineering. A description of Sarah O. Conly's book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012:

 Against Autonomy is a defense of paternalistic laws; that is, laws that make you do things, or prevent you from doing things, for your own good. I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated—that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others—and in particular, of government regulation—to keep us from going wrong.

Breath-taking arrogance, it would seem, in a book with a wide-ranging list of prescriptions for 'cures' for modern ills, including state-controlled food rationing and strictly enforced limits on childbirth. What distinguishes the enlightened engineer from the stupid meat-puppet would appear to be nothing more than that they are the few who would dare to believe they have the right to instruct the herd.

Doing things to people 'for their own good' can pass under various banners of moral, progressive and beneficial entities, but the oft-unasked question is cui bono? - since, while it is done in the name of the individual's best interests, their objections or demurring are hotly discounted by the do-gooders, not as authentic protest, but as stemming from another, external place: addiction, mental illness, bigotry.

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge. (Ayn Rand, 'What Is Capitalism?', Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)

Where they burn books

"Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.") - Heinrich Heine, in his 1821 play, Almansor

To exert social and religious control, in 1480, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to allow the Inquisition in Spain. On January 2, 1492, the leader of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada surrendered to armies of a recently united Christian Spain. They offered the remaining Muslims and Jews three 'choices': leave Spain, convert to Roman Catholicism or be executed by the Inquisition. In 1499 about 5000 Arabic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada on the orders of Ximénez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo. It is to this event that the Heine quotation refers. Over a century later, the Jewish Heine's own books were among the thousands of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's Opernplatz.

The burning of books is as ceremonial, as ritualistic and as much a public spectacle as the execution of a heretic. And sometimes books themselves are put on trial as if they were guilty personages. In 1242, the French crown burned all Talmud copies in Paris, about 12,000, after the book was 'charged' and 'found guilty' in the Paris trial sometimes called 'the Paris debate'.

'Public Health'

On the current version of state intervention in individual food choices:

Quite often these days, wartime rationing is held up as an example of a time when people ‘ate healthily’. But wartime is a time of universal dis-ease and distress. There’s nothing healthy about war. Wars kill people in their millions. And it is another example of a complete inversion of values that it should now be held up as being ‘healthy’.

It’s almost as if a new Belsen were discovered somewhere, filled with painfully emaciated men and women, it would now be dubbed a ‘health camp’ of a modern and ‘progressive’ kind, particularly if there was plenty of ‘healthy’ exercise in the form of breaking and carrying rocks. But if the new Belsen was full of fat people instead, lounging around doing nothing, doctors would express shock that its inmates had been so ill-treated as to be allowed to become obese (particularly if they were well-supplied with alcohol and tobacco as well), and would call for the camp supervisors to be put on trial, perhaps for ‘crimes against humanity’. Such is the inversion of values.

Ashes from Libraries

…like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.
              Olga Broumas, Artemis

Every totalitarian seeks to destroy the knowledge of alternatives. Islamists, like the self-labelled 'man of God' Terry Jones and the medieval Catholics, burn books, burn schools, burn girls who try to attend school. They smash artworks – sculptures and paintings in the Kabul museum, the Bamiyan Buddha statues – following the example of the 9th century Christian iconoclasts. People of this ilk burned the libraries of Alexandria, where many of the hand-inscribed works existed as single-number copies. As a result of this destruction, most ancient writers, scientists and philosophers are known to us only as names or sentence-long fragments.

This loss, the systematic burning of all prior knowledge in all its enormity and poignancy, has been portrayed only three times in contemporary popular media. It is the center of Fahrenheit 451 and of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a thinking person’s mystery-cum-novel of ideas. The film Agora, a romanticized version of the life of the legendary mathematician and philosopher Hypatia, depicts the burning of the library at Saramis, the sister-library to that at Alexandria.

Socrates Scholasticus wrote of Hypatia that 'she far surpassed all the philosophers of her time', and was greatly respected for her 'extraordinary dignity and virtue.' (Ecclesiastical History) Hypatia's house was an important intellectual centre in a city distinguished for its learning. Damasius described how she 'used to put on her philosopher's cloak and walk through the middle of town' to give public lectures on philosophy (Life of Isidore, in the Suda).

Hypatia was one of the most politically powerful figures in Alexandria. She was one of the few women who attended civic assemblies. Magistrates came to her for advice, including her close friend, the prefect Orestes (Damasius, Socrates Scholasticus) In the midst of severe religious polarization, Hypatia was an influential force for tolerance and moderation. She accepted students, who came to her without regard to religion.
 
Inevitably Hypatia’s story has been appropriated by anyone whom it would serve. Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire and Gibbons, used her story to castigate religionists and the Catholic Church in particular. In the 19th century Romantic writers took her story to hark back to the wonder of the golden age of Antiquity and mourning the loss of knowledge in the Dark Ages,  Charles Kingsley’s mid-Victorian romance being the most egregious example of that. 20th century feminists adopted Hypatia. She shows up as the name of a philosophy magazine; a 'plate' in Judy Chicago’s feminist art project The Dinner Party; and in Uppity Women of Ancient Times.

Hypatia met a bloody death - hacked to death or dragged through the streets behind a chariot - at the hands of a mob stirred up by accusations of witchcraft levelled at her by Bishop Cyril, a man vigorously working to bring Christianity to Alexandria by attacking paganism and Jews.

But it's not necessary anymore to burn libraries, murder philosophers or persecute heretics in order to suppress knowledge. There are far more subtle ways of creating an enforced forgetting of undesirable thought, by making thought 'elitist', by outsourcing it to an army of experts, by not permitting an individual to rummage in ‘the stacks’ of dusty tomes in forgotten basements.The ageing paper would burn beautifully, but no need anymore, since their existence is largely forgotten.

Aphorism #1

     The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Bertrand Russell

Athens and Jerusalem

A clarifying thought from current reading:

Prior to the Modern Liberal era, the unrivaled success of Western Civilisation was due to the healthy balance that was struck between the scientific and the extra-scientific, between craft and art, between the tangible and the imagination, or, in my favourite locution, between Athens and Jerusalem. (Evan Sayet, The Kindergarden of Eden)

If the Enlightenment was all about 'pure reason', scientific method and a return to first principles, there was disinterest or outright hostility to the extra-scientific, to questions of morality, to squishy stuff with grey or fuzzy areas that could not be measured or quantified in a laboratory or anatomy room. The Enlightenment ejected Jerusalem and elevated Athens, substituting the previous inbalance of the 'Dark Age' in which the superstitions, irrationalities, brutalities and myth-mongering of a time saw the burning of the works of Arab scholars and the suppression of the works of Aristotle, as Jerusalem sought to overwhelm Athens.

But with Rousseau the balance swung back again, as he damned the Enlightenment for seeking a version of human progress devoid of 'community, virtue, compassion, feeling, enthusiasm, the beautiful and the sublime' (Allan Bloom). Voltaire, writing to Rousseau after reading The Social Contract, thanked him:

Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost the habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.

Rousseau's Jerusalem decries all reason, learning and maturity, opting instead for a romantic primitive infantilism where the only measure of goodness and rightness is what feels true and nice.

Jerusalem without Athens brings the Inquisition.
Athens without Jerusalem brings the Holocaust.

The Spanish Ulcer*

Goya, Plate 72b, The Disasters of War

By the time Goya published the Caprichos the promise of the Enlightenment had dimmed. Carlos III was dead and his less respected brother assumed the throne. Even in France, the political revolution inspired by the Enlightenment had devolved into violence during an episode known as the Reign of Terror. Soon after, Napoleon became Emperor of France.

The satire of the Caprichos is succeeded by the visceral horrors of The Disasters of War, a series of etching documenting his responses to the events of the guerilla war and Napoleonic invasion in Spain, but unpublished during his lifetime. Plate 72b, 'The Consequences', remakes 'The Sleep of Reason' from the Caprichos, into something less philosophical and more pitiful memorial.

* Contemporary French term for the excessive and prolonged drain on military and economic resources caused by Napoleon's efforts to subjugate the Iberian Peninsula.

Word and Image

Language has an irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would be ridiculous to hear from another.

George Santayana – The Life of Reason

However personal our words feel, idiosyncratic our verbal expression may be, the language used is nothing that isn’t found in the language of other people. Language is, and must be, imitatory. As Wittgenstein argued, there can be no such thing as a private language: even a language shared solely between two people is not personal, since it must always serve to communicate to some audience, even an audience of one other. International mass communication may doom us to a slow process of mass homogeneity via our language.

Language - with its multiple public and private registers - allows the argumentum ad verecundiam, the argument from authority, of who may speak of what and where, and of how they must speak in order to be heard, understood, accepted. Words may be outlawed, banned, coined, butchered, mocked, but always by someone who rises to their full height and fuller authority and fullest offence-taking. And a thing you cannot name may as well not exist.

Linguistic utterances may be vigorously circumscribed, by consensus or stealth, but to circumscribe the possibilities of the line taken for a walk is a far harder task for even the most determined censorious authority.

Before the Law

As the media went into hyperdrive about the vote to permit gay marriage, a House of Commons committee quietly axed amendments to the Justice and Security Bill that would have made it less damaging to freedom. The amendments made in the Lords would have meant judges could only grant secret hearings – or ‘Closed Material Procedures’ (CMPs) – if other alternatives like the existing system of public interest immunity had been ruled out.

This Bill seeks to allow ‘secret courts’ in the UK, so cases that are potentially embarrassing to government can be held behind closed doors. After the axing of the amendments, the  Bill now determines that defendants – or claimants in civil cases – will be excluded from the hearings where their fates will be decided. They will not be allowed to know or challenge the details of the case against them and will have to be represented by a security-cleared special advocate, rather than their own lawyer.

Franz Kafka, 'Before the Law' (unknown artist)

In other words, if this Bill becomes law, the government would be able to do anything it likes, to anyone it likes, under a veil of secrecy.

Amnesty International UK Head of Policy and Government Affairs, Allan Hogarth, had this to say: 'If the Bill becomes law we will end up with victims of human rights violations being prevented from seeing secret evidence against them and even being prevented from talking to their own lawyers.'

Secret courts and judgements handed down on an accused who has no right to defend themselves are a tool of true totalitarianism, a legitimised form of ‘disappearing’ undesirables and troublemakers.

As 'members of the public' are kept lingering on the fringes of a legal system which has introduced nearly 4000 new instruments in 2012 alone, and where ignorance of the law is no defence, the hard-won right for justice to be seen to be done is set to go the same way as double jeopardy and trial by jury. And if no one knows, how are they supposed to care?

You who cannot

Capricho 42 'You who cannot'

In a world ostensibly turned upside down, donkeys ride humans. Spur-wearing asses master their human slaves, parasites upon their strength and energy, a double-edged satire upon class and power. There must, after all, be some moment of choice in taking up or retaining the burden carried. Why not slough it off?

But such insults could not go out into the world without the ground being prepared for them, without a defence being laid first: appeal to the vanity of the powerful while declaring that it is all mere invention anyway.

Since the greater part of the objects represented in this work are imaginary, it will not be rash to hope that its defects will obtain, perhaps, ample indulgence among the intelligent.

Considering that the artist has not followed the example of others, nor has found it possible to copy nature, although the imitation of nature is as difficult as it is admirable when it is achieved, one must allow that he will still deserve some esteem who, departing from her entirely, has been obliged to exhibit to the eye forms and attitudes which hitherto have existed only in the human mind bedimmed and confused by want of enlightenment or excited by the violence of unbridled passions.

 (Goya's advertisement of February 6, 1799 in the Diario de Madrid)

Roots

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs
How will we know where we come from?

Porrajmos

Goya, Saturn Devouring his Children

 

The Devouring (is not a Holocaust)

'We have been able to establish that more than 90% of so-called native Gypsies are of mixed blood…Further results of our investigations have allowed us to characterise the Gypsies as being a people of entirely primitive ethnological origins, whose mental backwardness makes them incapable of real social adaptation….The Gypsy question can only be solved when the main body of asocial and good-for-nothing Gypsy individuals of mixed blood is collected together in large camps and kept working there, and when the further breeding of this population of mixed blood is stopped once and for all.' (Robert Ritter, 1940)

In 1940, 250 Gypsy children in the concentration camp at Buchenwald were used as guinea pigs for testing the Zyclon B cyanide gas crystals, a lethal insecticide which from 1941 onwards was used for mass murders at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

3,000 men, women, and children perished in the gas chamber during the night of August 2-3, 1944, as the Germans liquidated the so-called Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager) in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

No-one from the Gypsy community was called to give evidence at the Nuremburg trials.

It was the porrajmos, the Great Devouring,

Pages of Murder and Blood

Dedication from Le Jardin des Supplices by Octave Mirbeau

An everyday tale of a day out at a Chinese prison, filled with shredded flesh, dessicated living corpses and florid methods of public execution.

A novel that has bemused and entranced me for a decade or more.

And a tale of monstrous legal torture.

Goya's Monsters

Plate 43 of 80 from Goya's 1797-99 series of etchings, Los Caprichos, 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'.

The full epigraph for caprichio #43 reads:  

Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.

Imagination without rationality creates horrors.

Goya used the series to critique contemporary Spanish society. As he explained in the advertisement, he chose subjects 'from the multitude of follies and blunders common in every civil society, as well as from the vulgar prejudices and lies authorized by custom, ignorance or interest, those that he has thought most suitable matter for ridicule.'

No simple-minded devotee of Enlightenment values, Goya. The cool identification of 'lies authorized by...interest' and ridicule directed at those with assumed authority resulted in the banning of Los Caprichos.

(Less than) Beautiful Soup

To reconstruct the thought processes of twenty four hours which take me from Hate-Art to here, now would require a word soup so thick as to be as to be entirely opaque. The soup's ingredients include:

inchoate rage at the squandered taxes of the working classes so that they might be sneered at by the great-and-the good (like that £8000 on a leaving do for the patrician Head of the Arts Council forced to resign, miffed at the 'savage' 'cuts' to the budget);

a profound puzzlement that those who claim to speak in a radical voice for the marginal and the despised (while always being able to call Daddy who could rescue them from the damp squat and cockroaches) will always choose the lesser over the better, the vulgar over the sophisticated, the ugly over the beautiful;

flailing around looking for an art that speaks for and not at or of my own class;

a fear that the consequences of contemporary amnesia, infantilism, foot-stamping, point-scoring dog whistle hatreds will incite a new barbarism as reason is eclipsed in favour of emotional psychobabbling technocratic totalitarianism.

See, told you it was a thick soup.