Random Variable

There’s something disparaging about paying £10 to see two people discuss radical politics whilst Tina Brown launches “The Diana Chronicles” to champagne in the room below. Such was the case last Wednesday when Michael Hardt (Empire) and Simon Critchley (On Humour) discuss their latest ideas in radical theory.

Critchley opened with an introduction to his new book, Infinitely Demanding (review to come), which posits the new radical anarchist politics against what he sees as passive nihilism (liberal democracy) and active nihilism (Al-Qaeda and friends). He argues that all philosophical projects arise from an ethical demand that must be unfulfillable. We’ll come back to that later.

Hardt introduced the new Verso release of Jefferson’s letters and talked about his support of the Paris Commune. Hardt agreed with Jefferson on the need for violent revolution every few decades to reinvigorate democracy.

I think the whole talk was lost on the audience if the Q&A afterwards was anything to go by. Someone wheeled out, as if by ritual, the “whole of society is violence” factoid. I’m sure sitting in the Nash Room on a hot summer’s evening is quite a violent experience. However, going the other way, when someone raised the issue Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities I don’t think it get the full attention it deserved.

After the discussion, and the inane questions, I managed to get a few moments with Critchley.

I was impressed by the fact that Critchley had used a term of his own devising, the dividual in his new book. If only because it’s referred to in Stand Alone Complex. So, I had to ask him where it came from. Alas, SAC uses dividual in the anthropological sense, so there’s no correlation.

I recounted my experiences with radical politics, and how, if anything, they seemed like regressives of the worst kind. How, so many of them, individually retreat into the passive nihilism of European Buddhism, and actively identify with it. In addition, especially the new-age anarcho-primitivism pitched by these groups is practically ecological genocide if ever enacted. This is not a “surely this will result in a gulag” complaint that Žižek claims we must avoid – this is empirical fact. In my little rant, I also spoke of how anarcho-primitivism is based on orientalist narratives based on Western notions of nature and society. In my opinion, this has implications on the kind of global co-ordination efforts that Critchley emphasises would be needed to destabilise capitalism. I did not find his answer particularly satisfying. That today, we live in a time where the anarchists operate on a sixties modus-operandi theoretically, but their practice is something new that he is attempting to put some theoretical weight behind. Sociologically, this is exactly Ulrich Beck’s zombie institutions thesis in action. The anarchists theoretical mode is a zombie – it is totally devoid of meaning in the 21^st Century. Individuals involved in the movements then accept the frame of passive nihilism. However, their practice becomes moulded by the conditions of globalisation – a forced cosmopolitanism. Critchley should be admired for taking on the project to cosmopolitanise anarchism today, and I’ll be looking closely in his books for what it has to say on the matter of late modernity.

I thought it’s high time I explain the “Riders on a Storm” box on the right to my many, many, readers.*

My friend Adele Pimley and her brother Daniel, are doing the 2007 London Bikeathon in aid of Leukaemia Research.

In the spirit of corporate social responsibility, I will match all donations up to £320 (pending approval from bank call centre) made on JustGiving.com as long as you include the comment “RV” to identify you came from this site.

Give as much as you can and make me poorer in the process! Wooohoo!

* I count 4 on Google Reader.

This second part of my report on the religion and politics conference is rather late. I was busy.

Specifically, I was busy madly dancing to this:

The first afternoon session was entitled “Europe’s Soul”. For some reason, this was heavily Italy-based with papers on spiritual conceptions of politics in the catholic church and the development of Secularism in the Italian legal system.

Carin Laudrup presented a paper on the battle of EU’s soul, focusing on the impact of religious education. She made a strong case for John M Hull’s three models of RE:

1. Learning religion
2. Learning about religion
3. Learning from religion

Laudrup claimed that RE is responsible for the entrenchment of nations and religions, which reduces the possibility of integration.

The final session was on Islam in the EU.

Benoit Challand did a temporal comparison of the question of Turkey over the last fifty years. What was interesting was that Turkey was seen as a vanguard of Europe in the fight against communism in original discussions over integration into the EU in 1959. Ultimately, they were rejected on the grounds of economics alone. Religious identity simply didn’t come into it. However, modern representations of Turkey in school textbooks looks like this:

Thus, Turkey is being dehumanized in textbook representation.

He claims that the question of religion and Europe is a very recent one.

On a similar theme, Luca Mavelli looked at the very core of European identity - “freedom”, “tolerance” etc… For him, these are very empty signifiers based on a selective memory of Europe’s world role - a memory which isn’t selective for Europe’s colonial victims. He ultimately believes that Europe doesn’t have an identity, and is in the process of forming one.

Katherine Brown looked at the impact of British policy towards mosques on female agency. Ultimately, British security policy is predicated on a orientalist myth of women as subservient wives and mothers, but are responsible for running the family. There is a belief that Muslim women are all Western liberals, if only they could be liberated, and that therefore they are the frontline of counter-terrorism operations. This ignores, for example, female piety movements which are highly orthodox. In addition, British policy around getting women into mosques is practically patriarchal chivalry. The end result is a securitization of mosques based on a lack of knowledge, and a denial of female agency.

Parveen Akhtar presented an ethnography of Unity FM, the successor to Ramadan FM which now has a 5 year license in Birmingham. She looked at non-classical forms of political participation, as expressed in radio discussions and local action. She explained how first generation migrants did not originally get involved due to the myth of return back to the homeland. As they gradually got more settled in Britain, they got involved, but bought over South Asian modes of politics to Britain. So votes for party candidates run along the lines of kinship networks and family patriarchy. Key to her argument was the claim that it is not apathy that reduces ethnic minority participation in British politics, but alienation.

[1] The Contribution of Religious Education to Religious Freedom

Due to an incident involving not being able to find my tickets for the Wireless Festival later today, and planned engineering works on the Underground which I completely forgot about, I arrived an hour late.

As a result, I only caught François Foret’s presentation on legitimation issues for the EU, and Max Fras and David Herbert’s presentation on European Enlargement and Secularizaton in Eastern Europe.

Foret’s take home message is that religious institutions may become banalised to private individual practise or play a larger role in the creation of a European polity. However, he doesn’t believe religion is a particularly special case for the EU, in the fact that the European identity still has yet to be established, and the EU’s current method of building functionalist institutions doesn’t lend itself too well to the creation of legitmacy and identity.

Fras and Herbert presented a few examples of Eastern Europe, namely Poland, Romania and Hungary within the context of secularisation and religion. They believe that what is currently taking place is a deprivitisation of religion in Eastern Europe, after experiencing decades of forced-secularisation by the Soviets, it is natural that religion reemerges. Their talk ties in with Sabah Mahmood’s claims that we need to challenge notions that greater affluence, open markets, education, healthcare etc… neccesarily results in secularisation.

Norman Doe presenting a paper on a possible common law for Europe, came in for a lot of flak, which he treated with very good humour. He’s the kind of person you’d like as a supervisor but you know would make a flippant remark when you need some crucial assistance.

Anyway, next session in ten minutes.

I’ll leave it to you to work out the context with which I repost this editorial put up on Facebook by a friend who travelled to Idaho and partook in the local culture by reading the local newspaper:

Last Sunday, while walking to work, an old friend pulled his mountain bike over and asked, “Have you noticed that the world is going crazy?” I let him know that I have been aware of some changes. So that is when he told me about a Web site that he had been visiting and that I would be greatly edified to check it out.

We’ve known each other for some time and tend to agree on most issues of which we speak, but I don’t know if he saw what I did during my visit to this site.

A couple of weeks back I had the occasion to go into Wal-Mart to make my monthly purchases (Quick note- Sam also made purchases at that Wal-Mart and left her credit card there, which led to a series of events that culminated with my being pulled over for speeding) and when it came time to pay, I pulled out my checkbook and was told that I did not need to write anything on my check because it would be done digitally. WHAT??

Well, it finally happened. The Federal Reserve Bank took the next step in making our society paperless without making a big deal out of the procedure. I guess I’m glad that I haven’t ordered any more checks.

Back to the Web site: Ron Paul was the choice for the next president and it was speaking about the Federal Reserve and how our government had begun the process of creating a new currency in America, which would replace the dollar. LOU DOBBS has been following the secret plans to make Canada, Mexico and the United States one country under one economy and one currency.

What the site presented was interesting, particularly when it spole of the RFID chip that could be used to monitor everything. When implanted in an individual it potentially could be used to keep tabs on anything relevant in our daily lives, where we went, what we purchased, even who we hung out with at the mall.

But the biggest thing was that if it were ever taken away, we would not be able to buy, sell or participate in life as we now enjoy it.

People called the chip Orwellian, big brother is watching.

But what I saw was the writing in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation and the prophecy of the second coming of Christ in the Holy Bible. The Iraq War is a distraction and we are in a pot of warm water that is about to boil. Can you feel the heat?

Scott Eric Kaufman, weeks after extolling the virtues of blogging gets labelled a white supremacist after defending a journalist’s right to report other peoples racism in a slightly mocking manner. The accusers include Jesus General, someone whom I once respected, and someone remaining anonymous, but feels it to be in the public interest to try and get Scott fired.

SEK has suggested that this latest episode may make him give it all up. We mustn’t allow it to happen.

Nay, for in the interest of the public good, Scott must continue to blog!

On Sunday, I went to watch Water at the Curzon Soho. Directed by Deepa Mehta, Water depicts the oppression of widows in Hindhu society in the late thirties, and the attempts of a follower of Ghandhi to liberate at least one widow from a so-called refuge.
In these refuges, girls as young as seven may be dumped because their betrothed husbands have died where they live in practical life imprisonment, and perhaps used as prostitutes by the local Brahmin.
What struck me is that I’ve actually unwittingly been to one of these places in the Tibetan Plateau, China (Xiahe to be exact). However, the place was described to us as a convent, as if the women had opted to be there, perhaps to prevent us as foreigners, from being filled with horror at this inhumane treatment of women. I hope I am mistaken in this realisation.
However, this is not the first time I’ve seen water being a strong component of a film about religious extremism, the previous one, being The Clay Bird about madressas in Bangladesh in the 1960s. Can anyone shed any light?
When one of the widows asks Nanrayan, the male protaganist about why widows must live in such conditions, he says, “It’s one less mouth to feed, one less bed to keep, one more corner to use. It’s a case of money disguised by religion.” That sentence probably sums a lot about fundamentalism and extremism - that they’re usually the result of social deprivation.

“Step 1: kill the infected. Step 2: containment. if containment cannot be done then, step 3: extermination” says Stringer Bell [1] Commander Stone near the beginning of 28 Weeks Later.

A few of my friends have dismissed the film on its obviousness, its inconsistencies, and its bad acting. They’re probably right, but that’s not why I like it.

Yes it is all those things, but taken on a purely symbolic level, it’s a whole lot more. It represents the evolution of post apocalyptic movies in the last decade. If we think back to earlier dystopic visions of uninhabitable lands, we are often presented with the image of the walled, fortress city such as in Judge Dredd [2]. Code 46 [3] was probably the first film that depicted something different. The true nature of our fortresses against the outside are already here, in the present, both in the green zones of Baghdad, but in the “cosmopolitan cities” across the Middle East, London, New York etc… The older films, project what is already globally present onto the nation state. It is no surprise, that with the exception of Code 46, directed by the exceedingly cosmopolitan Michael Winterbottom, that both Children of Men and 28 Weeks Later were filmed by foreign filmmakers.

Foucault is Dead makes reference to viral politics in 28 Weeks Later. There is perhaps no more direct depiction of a viral politics than in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. In the second season, the counter-terrorism are presented with exactly a political virus, which infiltrates the minds of vulnerable people and make them commit acts of terrorism culminating in mass suicide. However, what is interesting is that the virus is engineered by a state operative wishing to impose his ideological vision on the rest of Japan. He can only do this however, with the wealth of information and simulations that can only become available in a highly securatized, technologised and weaponised society. So, we can say that the terrorists and state actors are exactly the same in this viral aspect. The terrorists work from below, using ideology, the state from above, using technology.

[1] Played by the fabulous Edris Ilba, who some of you may remember from the British vampire series, Ultraviolet.

[2] It’s crap film, yes. Also, Aeon Flux also makes the mistake of showing a fortress city in the same way.

[3] Why don’t more people like this film? Is it because Winterbottom is one of those people who intrinsically understand globalisation.