Friday 25 November 2011

Very helpful advice

Via a comment at (again) Crooked Timber, a great European academic has some advice as to how we should all look at the Eurocrisis:
Its immemorial and its memory. All that makes up its bases and its origins. Its heart, that beats more and more faintly. Its soul. Its common and hidden grammar. The distinction, that it invented, between law and right. Or between man and citizen. The articulation, that is its own, of multiple forms of the Multiple and of the unique name of the One.

...

Europe was established, a first time, by substituting the word of the citizen-magistrate for the sayings of the oracles and auspices. It reconstructed itself a second time by favoring reason over anathema, preferring that a consciousness become transnationally national to the schism of faith and corps. Well, here, in the same way, we must confront these new soothsayers (the agitators of the financial markets), and the new grand excommunicators (agents of the triple A ratings), with a word, a wisdom, a manner of speaking and listening of the archons and the polemarches, faithful to the best of European heritage.

That's it then. We have our answer. Subsitute the word of the citizen-magistrate with a manner of speaking and listening to archons so that the multiple forms of the Multiple and the unique name of the One can be confronted by the oracles and auspices of the common and hidden grammar.

It's so very simple.

3 comments:

Niles said...

Would I look very aetheric geekoid if that made sense to me?

Of course, I could be reading the entrails of slaughtered vocabulary to interpret what I want, but I hear a similar theme at skeptic/atheist sites, if posited MUCH more bluntly (more signal to noise perhaps), IE: Employ everyone-can-prove-it evidence-based scientific reasoning over despotic-trust-me-not-your-lying-eyes uncritical,faith-based reasoning to improve...well, everything.

When evidence and logic are ignored in favour of faith-elite declarations that require blind obedience from below the water line of society and repeated failure is blamed on impurity of sacrifice, communities end up sorry versions of the "Groundhog Day" film storyline.

Europe's history is the 'West's' neon warning sign to that effect. I'm not surprised at the idea that some people have given up on power elites being progressive in North America and are looking to Europe for a flashpoint of 'let's-not-repeat-the-same-mistakes-expecting-different-results-this-time' revelation.

The European community has enough savoirfaire-cachet to shame anglo-North American attitudes, whereas the Latin American community could continue progressive reforms until all its states reach democratic Utopian Nirvana and the anglo-North American governments would sniff disdainfully. (I dunno, maybe it's a white privilege deference and I could easily be proven wrong, given how the US and Canada are smugly chiding and NorAmsplaining to European communities about situations neither former colony faces).

Being an Eeyore, I'm pessimistically expecting this latest global flashpoint between the workability of evidentiary reason and the failures of 'I find your lack of faith disturbing(tm-SithMBAprogram)'expertise to collapse back in a Lucy VanPelt solution. "I had to hit him, he was starting to make sense." (one of the more, if not the most, pithy Peanuts cartoon punchlines. Lucy was at least honest about it)

See also: Harper's ideological government in action, ignoring evidence-based critiques to criminalize and threaten more and more of the Canadian population with incrementally more radical knowledge/safety/infrastructure/environment/shelter/food/health/ insecurities. His ideology is Mind Over Matter. He doesn't mind and those harmed by his ideology don't matter because that's what the new prisons are for. Building the prisons first is thinking ahead. As Namo Mandos says, it's so very simple, neh?

Námo Mandos said...

I understand that there is a role for...philosophical obscurantism when dealing with certain questions that test the bounds of logic. I think that BHL's recent history suggests that any obfuscatory effusions from him should be treated as just that. I actually am inclined to read something sinister in his "look to Rome and Athens" business.

Niles said...

I admit to 'mal de mer' watching him apparently swan drunkenly from one pillar of society to another. He couldn't seem to make up his mind if he was for or against empire, territorial or theocratic, or if he was just observing it from a historical timeline.

His "Europe" seems pretty monolithic too, which comes across as bizarre when he insists on cutting out Greece and Rome as wild cards to show the room and then tucking them into the bottom of the "Europe" deck and extolling 'culture' *singular* on their backs. The present Greek and Italian nation-states have legacy of Firsts in "community organization" but those ideas have been added to by every subsequent generation around the world, not just the other European nation-states.

Also, 'apocalypse'. Is hyperbole philosophy? Call me Godwinning, but there were a couple of world wars a couple of generations back that left European state-communities in far sorrier condition, physically, infrastructurally, financially and psychiatrically.

I'm still interpreting a thread where he's waiting to see if the 'fixes' everyone declares are needed (for nations floundering in their ledgers after having their wealth-bases hijacked by unaccountability)are patchwork paint jobs to each specific or a deep, definitive rethink of how everything is done to stop being hijacked again.

He *seems* to be hoping for the latter and he *seems* to be hoping it's based on reason and he *seems* to be saying it would be ubercool if the two nation-states in the omigod limelight, who coincidentally have a legacy of 'birthing' Europe, would be the ones to say fuck this noise, we're doing something bold and brave.

But oi, he done wrapped it up in adulating sentence fragments tossed out stream-of-consciousness, in the best 'if-you-can't bedazzle-them-with-brilliance-baffle-them-with bullshit-I swallowed-a-dictionary-along-with-my-psilocybin'...philosophy.

All of the above is of course, based on my own primal human need to make sense of allegedly ordered information *and* my individual yearning to discern it in a humanist way.

It could very well be, he's saying when Italy and Greece turn into plutocratic serfdoms that make the trains run on time and blame currency devaluation on dirty fifth-column free-kitchen hippies praise the Lord, European states will fall into line like good soldiers. You could divine that from the words on the page as well. Rather like tarot cards.

He could likely get a job as a campaigning political advisor, he's so clear and concise.

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