New Project: Notes from the Underclass

Hold onto your nuts, I have started a new blog on Medium called 'Notes from the Underclass'. Pretension and procrastination continue to be my main skills. I intend to rejuvenate this platform too, and generally refocus my efforts.

As I am unemployed for the time being, I thought I would blog about the arduous task of applying for universal credit and chart the process (which could take up to six weeks). I also intend to interview people who have been living on benefits for far longer than I have. The point being to get the insights of ordinary people completely overlooked, marginalised and vilified by the media and political class.

This is not meant to be a long-term project, as I intend to get hired soon, but it is meant to provide some illumination and humour on unemployment. It's not enough to be morose about the state of affairs in the world. Though it is certainly understandable.

In defence of obscenity.

Whenever you hear the prattle of 'Western values' you should recall Gandhi's words when asked what he thinks to Western civilisation: "I think it would be a good idea".

It's undeniable, Charlie Hebdo spewed a lot of filthy racist trash. However, free-speech should extend to precisely those people with despicable viewpoints; but it's odd that the West pretends it does so. If the French establishment did believe in free-speech then it wouldn't have criminalised Holocaust denial. The same can be said of other countries, if the UK government gives a damn about free-speech then it should ditch its crazy libel laws.

"If you believe in free-speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you dislike," said Noam Chomsky. It's clear much of Europe does not believe in freedom of speech for despicable views. In spite of the fact that the French Republic has long laid claim to the foundations of human rights and civil liberties, it does not act as if it is. It was only in July 2014 that the Hollande government banned the protests over the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. So much for freedom of speech.

Many liberals have been calling for the cartoons to be shown on the BBC and CNN as a kind of anti-clerical defiance. As Arthur Goldhammer argues, the satirists at Charlie Hebdo represented a provocative corner of mass-media in the tradition of gouaille. It's meant to be obscene, offensive and on the edges of acceptable opinion. Of course, this is less true of the Muhammad cartoons, which unites much of liberal Europe, than it is of the racist cartoons of the Chibok girls.

The right to free-speech, which may be limited at the point where violence is explicitly advocated, should be stretched as far as it can be. The right may not be the reason to say disgusting and offensive things, but it can't be policed on such grounds. Nevertheless, it is more in line with the Hebdo spirit to excoriate the magazine for its virulent caricatures than it is to embrace them as 'martyrs'. It's suspect that the magazine is celebrated in this way, and I think that the cartoonists would be suspicious of this process too.

What it seems to confirm is that the provocation of European Muslims really isn't that edgy and isn't repressed at all. The question we should be asking ourselves is: should this be the case? In Goldhammer's words: "To transform the shock of Charlie's obscenities into veneration of its martyrdom is to turn the magazine into the kind of icon against which its irrepressible iconoclasm was directed".


This is a separate observation to saying such views don't deserve protection. Free-speech never meant omnipresence, people have the right to express their viewpoint, no matter how vulgar, but we're not obliged to republish it (though I have here, so you can see what I mean). Just as if a neo-Nazi came into your home and put up a poster denying the Holocaust it's not a violation of free-speech for you to tear it down. Publications and public speech is another matter. The people advocating the Muhammad cartoons be shown on the BBC and CNN are looking for a fight. They want to normalise Charlie Hebdo rather than defend it as the filthy rag it is.

Notes on Charlie Hebdo.

As my friend Chris Horner posted on Facebook:

1. The Hebdo murders were despicable, disgusting, awful. The people who did it must be caught and dealt with - preferably in a courtroom. It seems now very likely they've been killed: I've no sympathy for them.

2. The killings prove nothing about Islam, religion, immigration, France etc. Anything you know now, you knew 48 hours ago.
3. The nature of the magazine is irrelevant to the points above. Whether its cartoons were nasty and racist all, some or none of the time is a completely separate point. The writers didn't deserve this. No one does.
4. It's not disloyal to their memory, nor is it to condone the killings to raise issues about the kinds of things our governments have done, and still do, that helped to contribute to the situation in which those murders occurred. And the question of Islamophobia is an entirely legitimate one in that context.
5. A lot of nasty racists on the right as well as a distinct group of nasty, extremist 'Islamists' have the shared goal of promoting a 'war of civilisations'. An assortment of miscellaneous commentators and opportunists are also sounding off in the usual manner, in ways that don't help us to avoid this. Don't pass on their virus of fear and hate.
6. Try to think rationally. Remember it's possible to hold more than one thought at the same time. Don't conflate things that are distinct, but don't deny the way things are connected either.
7. Remember that the vast majority of people are decent, and that the killers and the fanatics of all stripes are an amplified minority, and a tiny one at that. Stand up, not for 'our side' but for the universal that struggles to be visible in all this: help make it visible.

It could've been a shoe.

It is worth noting that the 1960s witnessed the so-called "democratisation" of art, as low-culture and high-culture were rendered relative and the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred. It was the birth of postmodernism, as well as the beginning of entrepreneurial art. Pop Art began as a satire on the burgeoning obsession with image, as soup tins worth pennies in the supermarkets were transformed into prints worth thousands. In a studio known as "the factory" Andy Warhol and his assistants churned out those famous prints, which epitomise the repetitive monotony of consumerism. The psychedelic prints of soup cans and bottles of Coca-Cola were ironic. There was no message, no point at all and it was intended as a joke. But it  was a satirical slant on the rampant consumer culture of Western capitalist societies. The prints later increased in value to obscene amounts of dough, and yet they were famously depictions of banal objects - the sort of thing you throw in the trolley in the supermarket. It was soon absorbed by what it was mocking, the burgeoning commercialism.

It was never the aim to undermine the Establishment and melt down consumer capitalism to unleash the creative capacities of the proletariat. Its satiric reflection of passive consumption and pop culture was sold to the same consumers ensnared in fashion trends. Rather the capitalist system had to exit in order for it be mimmicked cynically with a nudge and a wink. It was a part of the burgeoning commercialisation of cultural forms. Pop Art could be seen as conservative in this way, it would inevitably be subsumed into what it was mimmicking as it subverted the traditional standards of fine art. The radical relativisation of all standards leveled the art scene, but only to become the Establishment. Today it's Tracy Emin as well as Gilbert and George who are the conservatives. What about Warhol? He died a millionaire. Before doing so, he decorated his own home with antiques and fine art which he personally picked over the work he delivered to the world. Ultimately the trajectory is nihilistic, again this is something else capitalism has in common with it. As Warhol remarked when asked why he painted Elvis Presley "No, it could've been a shoe."

However, Warhol was not the first to get rich quick in the art world. It isn't particularly shocking to us today, as we now live in a world where the man who had a shark preserved in formaldehyde has amassed an estimated net worth of £235 million. In 2008 Damien Hirst sold an entire show for £111 million, if we want to know where this began we have Salvador Dalí to thank at a fundamental level. In a sense Dalí was the prototype for the postmodern artist now predominant. You know, the crass kind who revel in commercial success. He would sign his name to hundreds of blank pieces of paper sometimes at $100 a pop, which were then used to produce forgeries of his work and in turn undermined the value of his own paintings. It should be noted that all along Dalí was fixated on commercial success and courted it with great luck thanks to his business manager and wife Gala. A lot of the money went to funding an extravagant lifestyle, of multiple homes and multiple lovers. The commercialism in which Dalí indulged as a whore artiste inevitably drew the ire of his fellow surrealists even before Dalí's shameful complicity in Francoism.

 

In the later works we can detect a fundamental shift to the postmodern Dalí after the Second World War where the works increasingly began to degenerate into high kitsch - with only a few glimpses of exception. In these years Dalí was guilty of the reduction of art's value to an instrumental level, whether the end be the stated aim of reaching a higher plain of consciousness or filling his wallet. He never shirked from offending the aestheticism of the Establishment as well as his fellow surrealists. Ironically, he may have given greater ground in his work to the extreme formulation of aestheticism that "What is useful is ugly!" As the work of Duchamp and Picasso were formerly derided as "ugly" before becoming the Establishment, so too has Dalí and the process began in his lifetime.  The accusation that this particular brand of surrealism exemplifies bourgeois decadence is not entirely undeserved. It could be that the work of the surrealist school, in its bid to empty-out the subconscious onto the canvas, has been symptomatic rather than exemplary.

Dalí's Black Feathers.

Premonition of the Civil War (1936)

"If the twentieth century was the Freudian century, so that even its worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochistic) vicissitudes of the libido, will the twenty-first be the century of the post-traumatic disengaged subject, whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muselmann, is multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural disasters or of family violence?" - Slavoj Žižek

Given the Surrealist circle that Salvador Dalí moved in as an artist it was inevitable that he associated with leftist artists such as Andre Breton, but he was an aberration of a radical art movement as he supported the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco once he returned to Spain after the war. So it was ironic when the Spanish establishment sought to mobilise international praise for Salvador Dalí on the centenary of his birth in 2004. The chosen portrayal of the surrealist was as a "rebel" and an "anti-establishmentarian" who stood up against the tide of art. But this is a misleading portrait of a man who sat on the fence for far too long. It was Picasso who painted Guernica, to some the quintessential painting of the fight against Franco, in opposition to Fascism and in support of the democratic forces in Spain. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War it was Dalí who refused to take a side and avoided the fighting. When Breton insinuated Dalí was a National Socialist he responded "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." In the end he found himself excommunicated from the Surrealist group.


Yet we should remember that the inaction of Salvador Dalí was violent in nature and proved conservative when Franco came out on top, he then proceeded to applaud the brutal repression that followed and congratulated the dictator for "clearing Spain of destructive forces". Dalí went on to send telegrams of praise to Franco as he signed the death warrants of political prisoners. Just before his death Francisco Franco had four more political prisoners executed and Dalí sent him a telegram. He later came out as an admirer of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange Espanola. Dalí sought to present himself as a dedicated servant of the Spanish Church, which was still celebrating Queen Isabella for expelling the Jews from Spain and stood behind Hitler in support of the Holocaust every step of the way. Dalí denounced his old friend Luis Buñuel as a Communist and an atheist. He pulled all the strings he could in America to have Buñuel sacked from the Museum of Modern Art, where Buñuel had tried to start a fresh after fleeing from Fascist Iberia.

Eventually Dalí had to flee Portlligat when the locals came for him. As the regime crumbled in the aftermath of Franco's death only then did Dalí emerged as an ardent defender of the monarchy. The only other despot to provoke a telegram from Dalí was Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was busily crafting a Kim Il-Sung personality cult around himself and had gone as far as to start carrying a sceptre around with him. The telegram Dalí sent to the Conducător, in which he showers Ceaușescu with praise, was a work of satire. Nevertheless, it was published in the Scînteia as a serious endorsement of the Communist regime. Post-modern irony had yet to penetrate really existing socialism. Before the collapse of Fascism in Spain he had made a point, especially in his visits to the US, to pray for the health of Franco. Dalí never strayed away from publicly announcing his unconditional support for the regime at press conferences and he only "dissented" from the status quo to praise Lorca. We might read deep into the lifelong adoration he had for Lorca as an expression of a yearning to dissent and really all of his support for Fascism were just forms of post-modern irony. I myself find this reading a bit too generous.

The Fascist regime in Spain became a blockage which had festered corruption on a huge scale and would inevitably have to be circumvented by the forces of capital. The marketplace tends towards relativism, plurality and individualism in spite of the fact that it requires a degree of traditionalism, bigotry and cohesion in order to maintain itself. So it undermines the very values which insulate it from revolution, this is true whether it is the moralisms of the Church, the conspiracy theories of nationalists or the syndicalist Third Position. When the socialist acts, the Fascist reacts and in a perverse sense Fascism was never violent enough to obliterate capitalism totally. Instead the promise of Fascism is an alternative modernity in which the class struggle is nonexistent rather society is unified through nationalism against the forces which are a threat to its' greatness. It opted to bring "super-capitalism" from bringing down the nation, in a similar way to social democracy it aimed to buy-out the revolution. 

Face of War (1940)

It is clear where Dalí stood, a bourgeois pig wallowing in the sheer decadence of it all. He sold himself to fuel a life of sexual and aesthetic excess, pushing the boundaries of taste further and further. All the while he claimed to be a "good Catholic" and posed as a "loyal citizen" to the state. Dalí could have been so preoccupied with fantasy and art that he found no need to take radicalism beyond the canvas to the streets of Barcelona. The prospect of anarchy was a terrifying one and order was necessary for aesthetic contemplation let alone creation. Dalinian surrealism was constrained to the tabula rasa of the canvas where anything could be expressed freely whilst it was enclosed by an oppressive framework of the state. To accept this we would have to swallow the line that Dalí sustained himself as a whore artiste by fawning over Franco at every turn. If that is the case then Dalí is no different than a Muslim who accepts all the liberal values of Western civilisation. A non-invasive Muslim that we can easily fit into our system of rights and liberties, someone who can be looked at in the same light as a middle-class white person with politically correct thoughts.

 

What's wrong with this suggestion? If it were simply a case of that then Dalí would have been no less conservative had he lived in the US. The difference is that he would be fawning to a liberal democracy and it's constitution of rights and liberties. It was not the case that Dalí had no other means of survival as Fascism emerged in Europe and reigned on the Iberian Peninsula for 30 more years than Hitler and Mussolini governed. He did not have to just take the sides of the people who murdered Frederico Garcia Lorca, a man Dalí loved. It was not impossible to live as an exile in opposition to the most homicidal ideology in history. The way in which ideology functions is systematic, it is material rather than immaterial and it remains hegemonic if it unchallenged. This is the way that Salvador Dalí lived in Spain as a fixture of the ruling ideology, it is not necessarily that he was a Fascist but it is the case that the inaction he chose was violent in it's complicity with Franco. He wasn't a non-invasive radical, he was complacent and increasingly so as the years past.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)

It was about money and when it wasn't about that it was about fucking. Even as it all came crashing down Salvador Dalí stood by tradition, specifically the monarchy, and just posed as another kind of conservative. It was the opposite position that he took in the art world where he was "anti-establishment" to the point of sabotaging the supply and demand logic behind the value of his paintings, he  would sign thousands of blank sheets of paper at $100 a pop to saturate the market with forgeries. It was an unabashed act of avarice and exhibitionism as well as a befitting expression of a particular aspect of surrealism. Of course I'm referring to the emphasis on paranoia, we can't even be sure we own a genuine painting by the man or even a copy of such a piece. We might even be tempted to write-off his appearances in adverts for chocolate as "ironic" but we should really just accept that he was a whore artiste of stupendous proportions for a very long time. It is the same lack of scruples which Dalí had demonstrated in his inaction around the Spanish Civil War and the aftermath. Perhaps Orwell was right to say of him "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."