Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street, 9th October 2011

"In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream."

Don't Look Up: Impostor and the Future

"There wasn't always a war with the Centauri, but in my lifetime it's all I've ever known. By the year 2050, six years after the first attack, we'd lost so many things. We'd lost the sky to electromagnetic domes, to shield the Earth from frequent air raids increasing in intensity. We'd lost the uncovered cities that the government forgot. We'd lost democracy to global leadership. We didn't expect peace anymore with the Centauri, because we came to see that peace wasn't their goal. Their goal was Earth. The ultimate land war, with no boundaries."

Gary Fleder's (2001) Philip K. Dick adaptation, Impostor, trots out merrily and seemingly without too much self-awareness all the old dystopian science fiction cliches: the violent, uncompromising homeland security agents with their baroque torture devices; the CGI-generated post-Metropolis, post-Blade Runner hypermodern city-scape; the scarred 'Zone' inhabited only by a brutalised underclass (including amongst their number, of course, one street-tough-but-still-scared cute little girl); on the bonus 'behind the scenes' documentary on the DVD the film-makers trot out the names of Kafka, Orwell, and so on, as though reciting an ecclesiastical litany; we even have the omnipresent propaganda posters with their Churchillian slogans - "Victory at Any Cost", "The Project is Your Future". But then, amongst the phrases familiar from 1984 and its imitators, we have one propaganda slogan familiar from another source, Thatcher's old mantra, increasingly also the motto of the Conservative-Liberal coalition: "There Is No Alternative."

Despite the association of the phrase with a PM deposed two decades ago, it is probably this one slogan, more than the smouldering iMacs and the ubiquitous iPads and the whizz-bang police technology, that makes this film (whose special effects, jerky camera moves and all over orange-and-teal-ness have otherwise aged very badly) feel like it still just might have something to say.

So, Spencer Olham and his wife (Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe) can still take a trip to the woode for a picnic and the national parks still look green and verdant just like they always did - until, that is, you look up and notice the vast electromagnetic dome which shields the sky from attack. And Olham can get in the shower and use his voice-activated music software system to play some tunes while he washes, but he can quickly get rid of that frenetic drum and bass which comes on first and replace it with John Lee Hooker with a simple voice command.

Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that at the end of the 1980s many of the communist leaders in Easter Europe resembled those Warner Brothers cartoon characters who had run off the edge of the cliff but not yet looked down. Today perhaps we are in the reverse position. It is not the past, down there, which has unexpectedly caught up with us, but maybe the future is here, already, up there in the sky, but we consistently refuse to look up and see it. And perhaps iTunes, iPods and all the other tools that are supposedly making music, in Gerd Leonhard's words, "like water," are not so much "the future of music" but in fact the very things that are blinding us to a future already present, and maintaining the safe cushion of the old familiar classics around our ears.

"Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robes in my face!"

Is there any more disgusting spectacle from last week's news than the sight of former Bullingdon vandals queuing up to denounce the looting of their London club house?

"Thuggish" cried Boris Johnson. "Unacceptable... violence and destruction" bellowed David Cameron. Both of whom spent their student days vandalising restaurants and scarpering before the arrival of the police.

While Zizek speaks of a "speculative identity" between those perpetrators of the "objective violence" - structural damage enacted upon on the people and state infrastructure through budget cuts to welfare and education - and the "subjective violence" of physical destruction directly enacted against persons and property; here there is no need for speculation. They really are the very same people. The same people who would hire out restaurants in order to smash them up, throwing money at the owners as they leave; the same people who now ransack higher education and benefits provisions in order to line the pockets of their friends in high finance.

What is so "unacceptable" to Cameron is clearly not the so-called "violence" and property damage - how can it be when he has as good as admitted to the thuggish behaviour of his own student days, all the while dismissing it lightly as mere drunken japery? No, what they object to is that this vandalism is not a mere jape, a prelude to flaunting one's wealth, all the while cravenly keeping one eye on any possible damage done to one's own future career; but direct action targeted towards a cause that transcends the people who fight for it, a cause for which those people are willing to sacrifice their own interests to defend.

There is perhaps only one more dismal voice in the week's news. The shrill voice of National Union of Students President Aaron Porter, leaping to denounce his own members before even the Bullingdon Boys had a chance to stick their oar in. Porter's denunciation shows unequivocally the same pusillanimity as Cameron and Johnson's hurried escape from the scene of the crime, the same craven eye towards a future career in politics (the list of former NUS presidents to have ended up in cabinet, screwing over the very constituent they once represented, is an extensive disgrace).

Those who, like Porter, praise the "good protestors" who obediently marched along the agreed route, sitting down when they were told to and standing back up again when they told to do that, but leap to condemn those "bad protestors" for whom such empty play-acting is not enough, want, in Robespierre's phrase, "revolution without the revolution."

In 2003, over a million marched obediently against the Iraq War and changed nothing. In France, this year, several times that figure marched and many also went on strike, achieving just as little. When the political parties show their contempt for the standard democratic procedure of making manifesto pledges, winning votes based on those pledges, and then sticking to those pledges when those votes bring them to power - it is time the public too accepted that normal democratic procedure has been suspended. Now, only direct action - and, yes, potentially violent struggle - has any chance of bringing about change.

There are other voices making themselves heard, less shrill, less contemptible, but equally curious. Those who say, 'What a pity! That the good intentions of 50,000 peaceful protestors were put to shame by the violent actions of a few!' And, 'Why must the media always focus on this hardcore minority instead of the overwhelming majority who did what they were told peacefully and dutifully?' - which latter is rather like saying, there are a million honest peace-loving citizens of Gotham City who feel no need to wear a mask or garish make-up - why must those mean old comics focus on the few who choose to spoil it for everyone else?

What emerges from these complaints, outwardly sympathetic to the aims of the protest, is the image of a subject supposed to vandalise. This subject is, inevitably, not a student, some sort of interloper, probably a member of the increasingly spectral 'black mask faction' of anarchists (the problem with the notion of anarchists protesting against the dismantling of the state clearly somewhat under-thought here). No matter that every report from anyone actually within spitting distance of millbank tower has found that at least the vast majority of the occupiers were, indeed, just 'ordinary students', swept up in the fervour of the moment. No matter that there is no evidence for the existence of this much phantasised 'black mask' faction (beyond the rather more prosaic reality of a few people spontaneously covering their faces in order to avoid identification by police photographers and cctv cameras). There is evidently a felt need for those protestors who occupied the building to be othered, for the speaking subject to distance him or herself from this supposedly dangerous and violent minority.

What appears to be lacking amidst all the hysteria, is any real question of why last week's protest erupted into this kind of conflagration. As with the riots in the Parisian banlieues in 2005, the answer seems to be a simple demand for visibility and recognition on the part of a constituent that has been shown by successive governments that its needs are simply not important to them. Even within the students own union, street protest has been largely suppressed for over twelve years now, twelve years in which first tuition fees, then top-up fees were introduced despite promises to the contrary, and student debt has escalated beyond all recognition. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have now broken their promises to students - and in what appears to be a kind of retrospective incitement after the fact, it emerged only days after the protests that, far from Nick Clegg's official line stating that he simply didn't realise how bad the economic situation was before the election, the Lib Dems had plans in place to abandon their promises on fees even before the election took place.

It should now be clear that if last week's protests achieved anything, then they achieved precisely this longed for visibility. At least one Lib Dem MP (in a stroke of typical Liberal opportunism) has now pledged to vote against education cuts, claiming inspiration from the "nostalgic" sight of student protestors. Trade union leaders have extended a welcoming hand to the students to form a coalition against cuts, with Nigel Stanley of the TUC claiming the protests have "given heart" to angry unionists. Manchester University has since been occupied in protest against the cuts. And the protest has been the focus of discussion across the media. To claim this would have been achieved without the occupation of millbank tower involves an extraordinary disavowal, a kind of willful blindness to the logic of spectacle.

There are those who will say that violence of any sort of unacceptable, those who will say that the Conservative Party Headquarters is the "wrong target". But a distinction must be drawn between violence against people and violence against property. The building's staff had long ben evacuated. These were acts of violence perpetrated against the building itself, and what it stood for. Like the Suffragettes, these protestors know how strong an argument is a broken pane of glass. As a symbolic target, what could be better than the new club house of the former Bullingdon boys and their running dogs? The only failure of the protest is that they did not stay longer, preventing in perpetuity the return of the usual occupants. And that they did not destroy more - computers, hard disks, filing systems, the very walls themselves. But this, of course, is only the beginning.

Avatar: Humane, More or Less

James Cameron's Avatar resembles, in its structure and function, a porno movie. But, just as Baise Moi does not resemble pornography because of the sex (no porn director who wished to continue working in the industry would film sex as badly as Mlles Despentes and Trinh Thi have managed), Avatar isn't like porn because most of the cast spend most of their time wearing slightly less than their underwear. After all, like many a fine cock tease, there is always a stray frond to cover a nipple when need be. No, Avatar can be compared to pornography more in the way everything revolves around, and is so relentlessly subjugated to, a limited number of 'money shots' scattered throughout the picture (floating mountains, flying dragons, and so forth). The acting is frequently poor, camera moves occasionally awkward, dialogue a mesh of cliches ("There's no such thing as an ex-marine," &c.), and the backstory is dispensed with immediately and perfunctorily in voice-over, so we can get as quickly as possible on to the familiar old story of the occupying soldier who, when he goes to sleep, fantasizes about erotic adventures with the native women.

In the phantasy space of the Na'vi's home, it is not just our hero who inhabits a computer-generated 'avatar' but just as much the music. Scenes around the space station generally follow a kind of standard, post-Hans Zimmer general MIDI neo-classicism. Once Jake dons the blue face of his Na'vi avatar, however, the magic of digital sequencing transforms the operatic western European motifs - a letter writer to Private Eye pointed out the similarities to Prokofiev's War and Peace, one could equally cite Rachmaninov's 1st Symphony and Wagner's Ring cycle, as hinted at by the army helicopters using the call sign, "Valkyrie" - into the kind of diaphonous worldbeat familiar from Barclaycard adverts (YouTube has even put one of those old Barclaycard ads in the 'Related Videos' if you look up the music clip from Avatar).

James Horner, thanks to previous Cameron collaboration Titanic, one of the most commercially successful composers of the 20th century, is somewhat notorious for his 'borrowings'. Alex Ross notes a sprig of Schostakovitch in Aliens, a soupcon of Schumann in Willow, and readers of Film Score Monthly have been known to sneer at his inability to mask such plagiarism. With Titanic, despite no Irish connections in the story, Horner's usual classical riffs were supplemented by Clannad in order to add a sort of all-purpose gloss of rootsiness. Similarly, in Avatar, Horner seems to apply the same tactic as linguist Paul Frommer did in creating the Na'vi language: a general sense of exoticism without resembling any specific language. So, Horner augments his synbrass with vocalese and 'ethnic' percussion to give a general impression of exotic orientalism Les Baxter or Martin Denny.

Zizek is right to call the film out for racism, "The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them." He claims, "In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy." Few scenes in recent cinematic history can be as insulting as the one in which all the coloured people bow down before the heroic white man in 'blue face' - with the possible exception of the one almost immediately afterwards in which the death of one white woman causes a ceremonial grief amongst the Na'vi far outweighing that displayed for the several hundred of their own people just massacred. The skewed logic of equivalence noted by Judith Butler in her latest book, Frames of War, is here internalised even by the victims.

The film's true ideological core, however, is not revealed until we see the destruction of the great tree ("hometree") in which the Na'vi had made their home. In the shots of this vast arboreal tower coming crashing down, and equally in their ash-coated aftermath, the visual reference is clearly footage of the collapse of the World Trade Centre on September the 11th. In James Cameron's mind, the Na'vi are not supposed to represent the victims of American imperialism, but the Americans themselves, their post-9/11 phantasy representation of themselves as rootsy beleagured pioneers, beset by unknowably powerful and blindly hostile forces on all sides. Note, Cameron's insistence in interviews that the film is not "unAmerican" but reflects the fact "that we are living through war." Despite its superficial protest, the film directly supports the very phantasy which sustains and justifies US imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth.

Their exists, then, a cruel irony behind the recent protest by Palestinians on the West Bank who 'blued up' in order to highlight the resonance between their plight and that of Cameron's Na'vi. For, as should be clear from certain references to Israel scattered throughout the film - a Na'vi who is said to be the best singer shares her name, Ninet, with a popular Israeli singer, and "Ey'wa", the deity of the Na'vi resembles a verlan pronunciation of Yahweh, while "Na'vi" itself is a Hebrew word meaning 'prophet' - should leave us with no illusions as to who Cameron sees as the innocent victims in that particular conflict. When Stephen Lang's bloodthirsty colonel promises to "fight terror with terror" it is not Bush and Cheney that he should remind us of, but videos of Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, insisting on the terroristic nature of American military intervention.

This is not, however, in the slightest to disparage a heartfelt political demonstration that caught the eye of the international media and was, at least in the eyes of its organisers, considered a success. So broadly and internationally popular a spectacle can scarcely resist containing some slight latent utopian promise, some hidden potential for the detournement of its ultimately conservative agenda. What is striking about the testimony of one of the Bil'in protest's organisers, Mohammed Khatib, is the way the use of Avatar's iconography seems to have resulted in the prior fictionalisation of the action itself, "At first they were surprised," He says, laughing of the onlooking Israeli soldiers."But then they began shooting and we felt like it was a scene from the movie again, except it was real, and it was taking place in the village."

Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson)

Mid-way through Wes Anderson's highly enjoyable new film of Roald Dahl's classic, Mr Fox (George Clooney) turns to his wife (Meryl Streep) in a moment of apparently earnest contrition, and says, by way of explanation for his outrageous and dangerous behaviour, "I'm a wild animal." "But you're also a husband and a father," she reminds him. At such moments can one possibly fail to be reminded of the shrugged shoulders of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, excusing his sexual or financial impropriety, "I never said I was a saint!" Mr Fox's curious combination of suave urbanity and occasional ravenous vulgarity seems to encapsulate the precarious position of many of today's clownish world leaders, caught between high tea with dictators and embarassing themselves before the U.N., who justify themselves before their people with an appeal to their sincere aspirations towards "greatness" (and great things, of course, sometimes require great sacrifices . . . ).

It was Ronald Reagan who established the typical postmodern figure of the "teflon president" (later to be imitated by Bush and Berlusconi) whose popularity only improved with his increasing public fallability. Whereas the commentators cataloguing his errors could only come across as stiff and pompously elitist, Reagan's fallability only seemed to make him more human, more lovable even, in the eyes of the electorate. The same is apparently true of Mr Fox: no matter how often his schemes and plans lead them into disaster and misery, the animals continue to accept Fox as an almost Mosaic leader, cheering his toasts as he leads them in doomed flight to the promised land.

Behind the pragmatic insistence of director Wes Anderson (in Sight and Sound) that the choice of American actors for the 'goodies' was purely due to a lack of confidence in writing for British voices (and, hey, animals don't really speak anyway, so why shouldn't they have American accents?), we should nonetheless discern a certain ideological mystification. For though, in truth, it is the animals in the film who are the 'terrorists', their affective position within the film as plucky outsiders corresponds perfectly with the self-presentation of the American state, since September 11th, as a beleagured bastion of freedom, attacked on all sides by almost supernaturally powerful foreign outsiders (and the British accent, of course, has been a stand-in for suspicious alterity since the dawn of sound).

Perhaps, however, The Fantastic Mr Fox goes some way towards deconstructing its own ideology. Far from the erratic, spontaneous personality Mr Fox presents in his sincere confession, the truth lies on the surface. He has, after all, the cunning of a fox. To quote Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, "this appearance of [Berlusconi's] being "just an ordinary guy" should not deceive us: beneath the clownish mask there is a mastery of state power functioning with ruthless efficiency." The fox is always ready to bare its teeth, lunge, and bite.

Apocalypse Now: Slavoj Zizek at Birkbeck College

Arriving some forty minutes before the scheduled start time, the room was already packed full. I just about managed to get one of the very last available seats, by inconveniencing several other attendees, having them get up, shuffle about and excuse me, as I slipped through to the centre of the row. Within minutes, the aisles at the side, and the back of the room were full of people standing, jostling for position and murmuring in anticipation of the man who has been called "the Elvis of cultural theory." 

With about twenty minutes still to go before time, a man who looked so much like a university lecturer he could have been in an episode of The Young Ones bellowed to the crowd that anyone without a seat would have to leave due to fire regulations. People started jeering their dissent, a man who had travelled all the way from Birmingham asked if the college would refund his train fare. One wag in a seat at the front cheered, "Let's all leave!" Pretty soon people started shuffling together, going two to a seat to fit people in (including, mercifully, our friend from Brum).

After such auspicious beginnings, it was almost a surprise to see Slavoj Zizek and his comedy sidekick, Costas Douzinas (truly the Cannon and Ball of critical theory) take to the dais entirely without fanfare, no stentorian announcer in a dickie-bow and tails, no trumpeting herald, no spotlight. Stripping off his fleece to reveal a brown v-neck t-shirt, already caked in sweat, Zizek announces that he is "tired of the old stand-up routine of the latest jokes and attacks on liberalism," before warning us that today's lecture will be mostly very boring and journalistic, with a lot of Hegel at the end. The crowd remain, undaunted, aware that this is just a part of his patter, his self-confessed tactic to "First kick the guy, then comes the theory - but kick him violently, and in the head."

Today's lecture, dramatically entitled 'Apocalypse Today' (a promise or a threat, I wonder), kicks off with Zizek identifying the three modern horsemen of the apocalypse: the techno-digital, the New Age, and the Christian fundamentalist, of which the last of the three is both the most dangerous, the most ridiculous, and also the closest to any kind of desirable emancipatory politics. The other two, at the limit, seem to pass over into each other, as techgnosis. For increasingly, modern bio-genetics tends towards the creation of entirely new life forms "from the zero level", and computer science, in, for example, Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense interface, tends towards the direct gestural interaction between computers, humans and physical reality. We become, then, through the aid of advanced technology, like gods.

The important thing for Zizek, though, is neither, like the Catholic church to decry such manipulation as immoral, dangerous and dystopian, nor, like the World Transhumanist Association (now known by the somewhat catchier soubriquet, Humanity+), to triumphantly celebrate our own self-overcoming. In their belief that the rational individual subject will ultimately survive every transformation to then decide ethically and sensibly how to use such bio-technological 'improvements', the transhumanists, for Zizek, are still too humanist. The opposition between techno-dystopia and new age optimism is a false one, the latter but the symptom of the former. We must confront technological change in order to understand it. The true miracle is not that thought might soon be able to directly influence material reality - the miracle is the gap, the distance that allows us to think and reflect.

Zizek has no time, however, for those who speak of the "proper measure", so much but no further ... and mourn the loss of our former organic connection with nature. This has happened three times already, he claims. First, the shift from mythos to logos that Alain Badiou identifies with Parmenides; next, the Christian break with the pagan cosmology; and finally, the modern disenchantment of the Cartesian subject. "The problem is not, my god, we have lost immediate contact with reality - the problem is that we see this as a problem." So, the true apocalyptic threat to society is this will to return to a "holistic civilization" of organic unity, and "restore the balance" with nature.

Of course, despite his opening caveat, we were given our fair share of laughs along the way, frequently with Costas feeding him a line and Slavoj supplying the punchline ("don't provoke me!"), and the usual attacks on liberalism ("Let us always emphasise how Really Existing Socialism was a nighmare, but let's look at Really Existing Liberalism ...":Islamic fundamentalism is the symptom of capitalist globalisation; UNESCO dismissed as "bullshit" at one point), and yes Hegel cropped up a fair bit too. Alongside Zizek's usual set of references though (Freud, Heidegger, etc.), we hear increasingly cited a cast of "friends": "My chinese friends", "My biologist friends", "My friends in Iran", even "My military specialist friends". He remains confrontational, sniggering of his lecture at LSE the next day, "We should go to the bastion of the enemy." In summing up, clearly eagre to carry on talking to anyone who will listen but with Costas, ever the martinet, desperately trying to reign him in, he claims simply, "I just want to create new enemies."

"The international economic system didn't work - and it didn't work in very dangerous ways."

As The Observer's Will Hutton and the Financial Times's Martin Wolf took to the stage of the Old Theatre at the London School of Economics today, in order to revisit their discussion from last October on the 'Global Financial Crisis', the combination of a constant bed of ebbing, drifting mid-frequency feedback and the vocal science of Hutton's impression of Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours, leant the discussion as much musical interest as intellectual. What Wolf and Hutton both agreed on was that, though the governments of the 'core' economic nations seemed to have learnt something from previous recessions, and in acting quickly and co-operatively in a concerted international fashion, in stark contrast to the London conference of 1933, may have prevented a crisis on the scale of the great depression; they have nonetheless apparently failed to learn anything from this recession. "We have not" claimed Hutton, "taken the opportunity to restructure the banking system at all." They predicted a period ("maybe a few months..." chimed Wolf to much laughter) of greater regulation, but otherwise, thanks largely to the enormous lobbying power of the finance industry and the extraordinary ignorance of politicians with regard to financial systems, it remains business as usual. While politicians crow about the risk of losing City 'talent' if hedge funds were more tightly regulated, Hutton demands, "Why do we need them?" and pours scorn over speeches by Brown (but also, and even more enthusiastically, Cameron and Osborne) as little as two years ago, that held up the 'innovation' and 'creativity' (a delightful euphemism for fraudulence) of the financial sector as a model for all other industries. Now the banks, as they said on Bloomberg, are back, kept afloat by our money, but fundamentally unchanged, because the only people consulted on the future of the banking industry were bankers, the very people responsible for the collapse. 2007 levels of growth may well return by 2012 and we in the UK almost certainly will weather this storm a lot better than, say, the urban poor of India, nonetheless, all the while we are sewing the seeds of the next crisis. And so the trillion pounds of bail-out the banks have now received is really little more than that flurry of activity, diagnosed by Zizek, whose object is precisely to make sure that nothing happens. 

Radio's Uncanny Origins

If Guglielmo Marconi had once considered the possibility of using his wireless telegraph as a means of contacting the dead, it would not be long before the same technology was being put to the service of mass slaughter. Already, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Marconi had demonstrated his new technology to the British and Italian navies and it was not long before it was in regular military use for the purpose of ship to shore communication and, with the invention of the thermionic valve, would prove an essential part of strategy and manoeuvres in the First World War. However, at this time, the use of wireless was still largely reserved for point to point communication and the idea that broadcasting, at that time considered a nuisance side effect of the technology, might become its principal use was largely foreign to those who used it. This was all to change in 1916, during the Irish Easter Rising.

On the 25th April, the day after Easter Monday, as the British troops called in reinforcements and declared a state of marshal law in Dublin, the Irish volunteers made the first broadcast from the post office on Sackville Street, using the same point to point technology to make a diffused message in the hope that their message, the declaration of an Irish republic, would reach the American press (Marshall McLuhan). In the same year, an employee of the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America called David Sarnoff would suggest to his bosses the possibility of radio becoming a “household utility” much as the piano had been; and so began the domestification of the radio at the very moment of the realisation of its revolutionary potential.

The formation of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922, at the suggestion of the Post Office, was largely a pragmatic attempt both to appease the commercial interests of the wireless manufacturers and to suppress the possibility of unrestrained amateur broadcasting. It was the BBC’s first Managing Director (and, later, first Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation), John Reith, who would articulate the philosophy of public service that would come to define the BBC’s mission (with true missionary zeal) in terms of universalism and national unification. Reith’s universalism was threefold, as Georgina Born explains,

First, universal availability: a national service meant that the entire population of the United Kingdom should be able to receive a high-quality broadcast signal. Second, there was a commitment to a form of social and cultural universality, in that the BBC undertook to produce both a regional and a national programme service. The audience was conceived both as a unity and as socially and culturally diverse. The BBC was to be an impartial arbiter, assessing the various constituencies and tastes and responding accordingly. Third, there was a universality of genre in the policy of mixed programming from the outset, BBC radio broadcast a wide range of genres each day and week, including news, talk, sports, drama, religion, light entertainment and a variety of music – both popular and classical. 

Reith’s universalism was centred around a concept of “the best of everything,” conceived as politically neutral and, ultimately, transparent, but which was to prove highly flexible given the different articulations of subsequent Director-Generals. The drawing together of the diverse strands of audiences and programming in the specific manner undertaken by the early BBC was thus responsible for a “new kind of public, commensurate with the whole of society, which it brought into being.” .

The BBC, under the “massive, totalitarian, and idiosyncratic” stewardship of John Reith came to exist in a ‘hegemonic relation’ to the British populace, “the nation [as] one man,” in Reith’s famous phrase - a spectral substitution whereby, “a certain body tries to present its particular features as the expression of something transcending its own particularity.” (Ernesto Laclau) The form of this relationship was through the metaphor of the National Family (David Morley) and the image held in the mind of BBC programme-makers of their audience was of “a family audience, seated round the fireside at home.” The radio thus became instituted, not just as a piece of furniture at the heart of the family home, but as the principal symbolic association between the domestic family and the nation state. At the heart of radio’s familiar homeliness, however, was an unsettling movement of the uncanny.

In Sigmund Freud’s (1919) essay on ‘The Uncanny’ [Das Unheimliche] he lays stress on a certain undecidability to be found in standard dictionary definitions of unheimlich’s apparent opposite, heimlich [homely]. Freud’s dictionary defines heimlich as both the “familiar and agreeable” and “what is concealed and kept out of sight.”. Freud thus sees in heimlich a meaning “which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”. This precisely is what is at work with regard to the position of the radio in the family home in modern Britain. By bringing the public sphere into the very heart of the private space of the home ), broadcasting created a structural indeterminacy between inside and outside, an intimacy that whispers in your ear, and the exteriority of an actuality constituted through outside broadcasts, summed up by Lacan’s concept of extimité or extimacy. The extimate object is the disembodied voice, which “functions as a strange body… a ghost-like apparition which can never be pinned to a definite visual object;” (Slavoj Zizek) The appearance of the voice, transmitted and transfigured through the ether, was perceived as a kind of uncanny intrusion from the very first radio transmissions, as Harlow describes of an early long distance transmission by R. A. Fessenden on Christmas Eve, 1906,

They listened eagerly, and to their amazement heard a human voice coming from their instruments – someone speaking! Then a woman’s voice rose in sound. It was uncanny!

Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume I: The Birth of Broadcasting, 1961, London: Oxford University Press; 

Cardiff, D. & Scannell, P., ‘Broadcasting and National Unity’, in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, Curran, J., Smith, A. & Wingate, P. (ed.s), 1987, London: Methuen, pp.157-173;

Morales, C., ‘Radio From Beyond the Grave’, in Radiotext(e), Strauss, N. (ed.), 1993, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 330-2;Scannell, P. & Cardiff, D., A Social History of Broadcasting – Volume One 1922-1939: Serving the Nation, 1997, Oxford: Blackwell;

Seaton, J., ‘Broadcasting History’, in Power Without Responsibility, Curran, J. & Seaton, J., 1981 [1997],London: Routledge.

"When Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget that you're grown."

One of the best bits in Eddie Murphy's Raw is a skit early on in which Murphy recounts being chastised on the telephone by Bill Cosby for using so much foul language doing stand-up. Afterwards Murphy calls Richard Pryor, "And Richard was like, 'Tell Bill Cosby to suck my dick!'" The way he gets, just perfectly the vocal mannerisms of Cosby, and especially Pryor, betrays hours spent studying their records as a child. The mimicry is all in the voice - he doesn't really get them physically. It's a little like what Simon Reynolds is talking about in The Guardian - a portrait of the artist as a consumer. A similar thing happens towards the end of Woody Allen's much-maligned homage to the Hollywood musical, Everyone says I love you (the title itself is a homage to the Marx Brothers). Interestingly, it's all set up by the music: a scene before features an instrumental snatch of 'You brought a new kind of love to me', the song each of the three Marx Brothers sing in order to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business, next a big musical set-piece opens with a couple of dozen dancers, all dressed as Groucho, singing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' (from Animal Crackers) in French. Then we have Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, talking intimately with Groucho disguises on, in the midst of a party where everyone has a Groucho mask. The dialogue itself is very Woody Allen but just a few times Woody throws in a few smirks and raised eyebrows that are just perfectly Groucho, betraying exactly the same obsessive watching and re-watching of old Marx Brothers films as Eddie Murphy with his Richard Pryor records. Curiously, when a comic pays his respects to another comic, he borrows the style and mannerisms (form) but not the actual gags (content), whereas a band will tend to cover another band's song (content) but will be expected to do so in there own style (form). Of course, there is a certain taboo amongst stand-ups around 'stealing' another comic's material and doing impressions is a common feature in comedy routines, whereas musicians are expected to develop their own style, their own 'voice', but playing covers is accepted as educative. However, what happens in a hypothetical situation in which Eddie Murphy is doing an impression of Bill Cosby chastising him for using swear words in his act, and as Cosby chastises Murphy he starts to impersonate him, so we have Murphy impersonating Cosby impersonating Murphy. Or what if the specific bit of Murphy's act that Cosby has a problem with is the bit where he does an impression of Bill Cosby, so we end up with Murphy doing an impression of Cosby doing an impression of Murphy doing an impression of Cosby ad infinitum. We find ourselves back in the territory of Douglas Hofstadter's 'strange loops'. How might this work in music? Already, with Allo Darlin', we have a kind of meta-music, a music with other music nested within it. If I (or, even better, Johnny Cash) were to then cover 'Heart Beat Chilli' with its reference to 'I Walk the Line', then we reach a kind of meta-meta-level, but still not the kind of tangled hierarchies we find in Gödel, Escher, Bach. 

These kinds of Epimenidean structures turn up a lot in marxism - Vladimir Tatlin's Escher-like Monument to the Third International springs immediately to mind. Or take Zizek's analysis of the relationship between politics and economics (in In Defense of Lost Causes), such that politics is determined in the last instance by the economy, but by an economy which is itself a political-economy, an economics imbedded in, and imbued with, politics. Of course, Zizek delights in seeming paradoxes like this, but it is interesting to see these kind of self-referential loops turn up even in the critics of marxism. Doesn't Simone Weil's image, for her critique of the logic of proletarian auto-liberation, of a horse riding itself, recall somewhat Escher pictures such as 'Drawing Hands'?

"capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight - it shines, but it stinks."

Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), concerns an American Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin (James Cagney), charged with looking after the boss's daughter for a few weeks while she holidays in Europe. The day before her parents are due to come and pick her up, Cagney discovers that the girl, Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin), has married a Communist Party member, Otto Piffl (Horst Bucholz) from East Berlin. Panic-stricken at the thought of her father's reaction, he plants a cuckoo clock that plays Yankee Doodle Dandy on the hour and a balloon with "Russki Go Home" emblazoned on it, on the boy's motorbike. On crossing the border back into East Berlin, Piffl is arrested by the East German police and tortured (by being forced, repeatedly, to listen to 'Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny-Yellow-Polka-Dot Bikini', anticipating Guantanamo Bay by some forty years. The scene is played strictly for laughs, so, contra-Marx, it is the first time that is farce, and only its repetition that is truly tragic) into confessing to being an American spy. Satisfied that no more will be heard of Piffl, Cagney then discovers that Scarlet is in fact pregnant and is forced to bribe the authorities into releasing Piffl, concerned that a child with no father might be thought even worse than a child with a communist father. Cagney then sets about tranforming Piffl into a model son-in-law for his boss: ordering him expensive clothes, a suite at the Hilton, teaching him manners and eating habits, giving him a decent job (for Coca Cola, naturally), and even going so far as to have him adopted by a local count. 

The ultimate lesson to be learnt from this film is, of course, that Piffl was in fact guilty of betraying the East German state, and the police were right to torture a confession out of him. We have here an exemplary case of the "objective guilt" cited by Zizek, "While you can be an honest individual who acted with the most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless "objectively guilty," if your acts serve reactionary forces - and it is, of course, the party which has the direct access to what your acts "objectively mean."" (In Defense of Lost Causes) When Piffl is first stopped by the police, on account of the anti-Soviet balloon attached to his bike, it is during his stuttered attempt to explain that the 'Uncle Sam' cuckoo clock interrupts, like a parapraxis, by blurting out the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Similarly, the day after his (forced?) confession to being an American spy, Piffl has at first forgotten all about it. The incident has been repressed by his superego for coming too close to the unbearable truth at the core of his subjectivity. Despite Piffl's sincerity and subjective commitment to socialism, it is clear that the combination of Scarlet's naive, cosseted rich girl and Piffl's slavish devotion to her can only lead to him betraying his cause (as is proved by his scant protest to being transformed into an exploitative capitalist boss at the end of the film), either with or without Cagney's intervention (which merely speeds up the inevitable). And if not that girl, then another...

Revolution 4.5: The Beatles' Vanishing Mediator

The Guardian on the recent discovery of what purports to be take twenty in the recording of the track 'Revolution One' from The White Album, which, bearing both the lyrics and chords of 'Revolution 1' and the so-called 'experimentalism' of 'Revolution 9', acts as a kind of "missing-link" between the two. "Interesting," claims The Guardian's Tim Jonze, "until we find out it's all an elaborate hoax tomorrow." So, is it a hoax or is it for real? Well, the answer is, of course, both. To adopt a favourite trope of Slavoj Zizek's (in, for example, The Plague of Fantasies), it is, rather like the middle stage elaborated by Freud in 'A Child is Being Beaten' ("I am being beaten by my father"), a "construction of analysis" never actually assumed by the subject in question, lacking any positive existence in reality, and precisely as such, identical to the Lacanian Real  - the subject's fundamental fantasy, "the very kernel of the subject's being" (Zizek). This explanation is totally consistent with George Martin's claim, at the time of the release of his son's Love mash-up for Cirque Du Soleil, that there was no more Beatles material to be found in the archive, since, as Freud says quite clearly, this middle stage is "never remembered" by the subject in question. And so, as 'the Real' of The Beatles that must inevitably disappear from sight, what does this track tell us about their oeuvre? Well, the dull, plodding rhythm, the pedestrian I-IV-V chord sequence, the asinine lyrics trumpeting "revolution" but shirking at the possibility of any "destruction" taking place (truly, Robespierre's "revolution without the revolution") - all this we knew already from the version ('Revolution 1') on The White Album - but what is laid particularly bare on this 'new' version is just how little the famed 'experimentalism' of The Fab Four rises above the level of a bunch of stoned frat' boys horsing around with kazoos, 'funny' voices, and tape-reversed standard electric blues riffs. Whereas 'Revolution 9' sounds at times, at least superficially, a little like some of John Cage's tape experiments (such as 'Fontana Mix' from 1958), we can now say, almost for certain, that its constructions lacked any of the rigour and precision of Cage's work. A timely reminder, in the wake of McCartney's recent check-me-out-I'm-so-damn-out-there-man press junket for his latest Fireman album.