Zahir vol.2 iss.2. 25th June 2007

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Monday 25th June, 2007

Volume 2, Issue 2

globalisation: special debate globalisation and the supposed universality of western values daniel sjöström

misguided or mistrusted? nicholas r. w. fisher

what is it, and do we want it?

the university of york’s literary magazine.

the zahir

raoul lundberg

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: tokyo as metaphor: the films of shinya tsukamoto elena tiis auden at 100 james macdougald non serviam? panos demopoulos

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 Volume 2, Issue 2 Monday 25th June, 2007 thezahir.co.uk

contents literature 3 Katherine Ebury “Trying to put it together”: Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes 4 Sarah Roberts Salman Rushdie and the Politics of Magical Realism 5 Tom Watson Cyberpunk: Still a Revolutionary Vision of the Future?

7 James Macdougald Auden at 100

politics 9 Toby Smith What Can Be Done in Iraq?

11 Robin Jervis The Arms Trade 13 Peter Hagen Silent Slavery: The Forgotten Trade 15 Rob Perkins What Price Utopia? The Case of Euthanasia

globalisation debate 17 Daniel Sjöström Globalisation and the Supposed Universality of Western Values 20 Nicholas R. W. Fisher Globalisation: Misguided or Mistrusted?

21 Raoul Lundberg Globalisation: What Is It, and Do We Want It?

poetry 24 Katherine Ebury Warmth.

arts 22 Elena Tiis Tokyo as Metaphor 23 Marin Hirschfeld Caryl Churchill’s Recent Political Theatre

commentary 26 Panos Demopoulos Non Serviam?

© The Zahir, 2007. Copyright of individual pieces remains with the contributors.

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the zahir the university of york’s literary magazine.

contributors panos demopoulos studied music at Napier University, Royal Northern and Cambridge before coming to York to do a composition PhD and to play for the basketball team. katherine ebury is a third year English student who likes tea. She has “been a boggler ever”, whatever that means... nicholas r. w. fisher is happy believing the free market will solve everything. peter hagen may well personify the phrase “pretentious pullover-wearing pillock”. He makes up for this by eating steaks and ice cream (though not simultaneously). marin hirschfeld sometimes sits for hours in front of a blank screen before writing. This sentence took four and a half days. robin jervis is a first year politics and economics student. james macdougald is an unscrupulous and heavily armed geopolitical wingnut of the kitchen sink variety. rob perkins had only just settled in at York. Rob Perkins is, for a matter of weeks now, a history and politics undergraduate. sarah roberts is a second year English student with the wit of Oscar Wilde and a penchant for small shiny things like sequins. raoul lundberg is just another brick in the wall.

elena tiis is an amateurish, voluntary, part-time, not-for-profit simulation of a Far East correspondent. daniel sjöström is a bit short on ideas.

toby smith dislikes being associated with the horsemen of the apocalypse, yet finds their views on contemporary politics most intriguing.... tom watson is a student of literature, a master of puns, and a would-be cricketer.

Editorial Team: Proofreaders: Josh Chambers, Vicky Clarke, Nicola Fairhead, Anna Frame, Jenny Hill, Louise Norman, Hollie Price, Jenni Southern, Laura Turner, Michelle Wheeler.

Copyeditors: Josh Chambers, Nicola Fairhead, Anna Frame, Rob Perkins, Jenni Southern, Michelle Wheeler.

Section editors: James Macdougald (literature), Robin Jervis (politics), Peter Hagen (arts), Kellie Mills (commentary) Deputy head of production: Daniel Sjöström Head of production: David Hopkins Editor: Toby Smith

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

literature

“Trying to put it together” Horse Latitudes. Paul Muldoon. 80pp. Faber. £14.99. 0-57-123234-5 (hardback).

H

orse Latitudes is an uncomfortable book, spatially speaking. Although Paul Muldoon’s latest collection is full of geographical references we are frequently made to feel that the world is very small, tied together in disquieting ways. Despite the poet’s reputation as an academic prankster and mock-pedant, in which he charmingly revelled in his recent reading at York, there is no mistaking the darkening tone of these poems. Here death is a major concern, and it is everywhere, inescapable.

In the opening sonnet sequence, battlefields as distant as “Beijing” and “Bannockburn” are made neighbours, linked by alliteration, associations with violence and the enigmatic presence of “Carlotta”, who has her own battle to fight, against cancer. In this sequence of nineteen, however, the reader cannot help but postulate a twentieth—powerful in its absence: Baghdad. This unwritten poem still feels startlingly visible, as though it were only half-submerged within the rest of the sequence, as in “Blackwater Fort”, where topical allusions suddenly break the surface:

As Muldoon himself has remarked, these poems were begun “as the US embarked on its foray into Iraq” and they can in part be read as a comment on the stagnation of American culture and policy under Bush. This ability to interrogate culture, transcending meaningless lyricism, is one of Muldoon’s most valuable qualities as a modern poet. So many lesser poets shy away from the “big issues” that, however dark his mood, Muldoon’s voice will always be refreshing. This first sequence of poems seems to link public and private themes very successfully.

In other poems of the collection

the sense of spatial discomfort becomes greater: even the borders between past and present seem to have been dismantled. With Muldoon’s consciousness apparently awkwardly positioned between contemporary America and the Ireland of his youth, the simplest actions may abruptly open the door to another place, as in “Eggs”: I was unpacking a dozen eggs into the fridge when I noticed a hairline crack at which I pecked till at long last I squeezed into a freshly whitewashed scullery in Cullenramer…

Here, the dividing line between

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Muldoon’s consciousness is awkwardly positioned between contemporary America and the Ireland of his youth.

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ALSO IN THIS SECTION 4—salman rushdie and the politics of magical realism 5—cyberpunk: still a revolutionary vision of the future?

7—auden at 100

literature

“Why,” Carlotta wondered, “the House of Tar? Might it have to do with the gross imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on only when the Tigris comes clean?”

Katherine Ebury

past and present, and Ireland and America, is imagined as just “a hairline crack”: but memory is seen as more painful and more problematic than a Proustian moment of epiphany. The image of “squeez[ing]” in particular, as well as the underlying metaphor of the return to the egg/womb, which is made explicit in the closing lines of the poem, suggests that this movement is far from normal nostalgia, instead it is viewed as a regression, in truth a rather disturbing one. Equally, the frequent appearances of horses in these poems add to this sense of spatial unease, as the traditional associations of horses with Ireland, coupled with the definition of Horse Latitudes given on the flyleaf to the book as “an area north and south of the equator in which ships tend to become becalmed, in which stasis, if not stagnation is the order of the day”, suggests that although Muldoon has not lived in his birth-country for many years, regression and stagnation is something that he remains concerned about in his relations with Ireland.

Both America and Ireland thus seem, in Muldoon’s middle age, to be equally confining and unsatisfactory.

Reflecting this, the collection is often somewhat claustrophobic, perhaps due in no small part to Muldoon’s taut virtuosity with form.

When this virtuosity really works it is breathtaking. Traditional forms such as villanelle, haiku or riddle are

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literature slightly tweaked so that even the most serious readers of poetry become too caught up in the movement of the lines to bother identifying the form. An example of this is the excellent modern pantoum (a form where lines two and four of stanza one become one and three of stanza two, and so on), “The Mountain Is Holding Out”: The mountain is holding out for news from the sea of the raid on the redoubt.

The plain won’t level with me for news from the sea is harder and harder to find.

The plain won’t level with me now it’s non-aligned

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 modern condition.

Still, what really redeems this collection is not a statement of the postmodern condition—or even the creative pyrotechnics of “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”. It is Muldoon’s skill as an elegist, in which he has perhaps come to surpass even Heaney. The truly memorable “Turkey Buzzards”, written for Muldoon’s terminally ill sister Maureen (to whom the book is dedicated), achieves an intimate, regretful tone, balanced deftly between the sublime and the prosaic. “Sillyhow Stride”, another elegy, this time for Warren Zevon, mingles responses to the deaths of his friend and his sister in order to create something more visceral, angry and anguished, hint-

and harder and harder to find …

But it doesn’t always work out as comfortably convenient as this. The tight, patterned repetitions and full rhymes of “The Old Country” are playfully used along with cliché, in order to reflect the cultural stagnation and linguistic dysphasia of Ireland: Where every town was a tidy town and every garden a hanging garden.

A half could be had for half a crown.

Every major artery would harden since every meal was a square meal.

Much of this poem is wonderful, and no doubt Muldoon had a lot of fun writing it. But, after a certain point, reading it becomes uncomfortable, almost unbearable: the lines close around you like a cage.

Although this is no doubt intentional, at the York reading Muldoon himself knew not to read the whole thing (13 sections in all) at once, choosing instead to read shorter passages. The poet’s approach of internal conversation often produces a similar claustrophobic effect, making one wonder if all the different spaces in these poems are not merely essentially within his own head. All of this is, however, not criticism as such; instead it seems to be part of Muldoon’s conception of the post-

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Paul Muldoon ing at our culture’s own self-destructiveness: …I knelt and adjusted the silly how of her oxygen mask, its vinyl caul unlikely now to save Maureen from drowning in her own spit.

I thought of how the wrangling schools need look no further than her bed to find what fire shall burn this world.

Perhaps Horse Latitudes is a difficult, claustrophobic collection: there is undeniably an air of aesthetic midlife crisis about it. But it is also touchingly passionate; a work of anger and distress, which still achieves, despite it all, a sense of the power and the playfulness of language.

Salman Rushdie and the Politics of Magical Realism Sarah Roberts

M

agical realism is a literary mode of which Salman Rushdie makes extensive use in his novels, often to convey a political message. It is a technique in which the author presents realistic characters, settings, and events but with elements of the fantastic or mythical which are accepted as a normal part of the world: for example, flying carpets and genies in an otherwise realistic environment. The question I want to address is whether the use of magical realism is actually an effective tool for putting across a political message.

In Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, a group of 1001 infants born at midnight on the eve of India’s independence discover they have various special abilities (such as time travel or the ability to fly), the most powerful of which is the narrator Saleem Sinai’s ability to read the minds of others and speak to them telepathically. The Midnight’s Children function as the main magical realist device in the novel and represent different forms of government. Saleem suggests that their ability to communicate telepathically (using his mind as a channel) can be used to form a sort of democratic conference ground where the children can all voice their views and decide how best to use their powers.

However, Shiva, Saleem’s alter ego, believes that he and Saleem should alone be the leaders of the group, as their powers were distributed in a hierarchical manner: those born closest to midnight had the greatest gifts. Essentially, Shiva and Saleem represent two opposing ways of thinking about the newly born India: should it be an authoritarian, homogenous nation dominated by a single party or individual? Or should it embrace the multiplicity of its constituent religions and languages in a democratic manner?

Rushdie explores complexities such as these through his use of magical realism.

But is there not an inherent problem with this technique, in that the mythical elements actually detach the reader from the reality of what is being described? If the reader cannot relate to the political

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 issues Rushdie is portraying in this manner, they cannot possibly empathize with his views. The fantastic elements of magical realism are essentially untrue, and something cannot be effective if it cannot be believed. Despite these arguments, it does appear that magical realism works in Rushdie’s novels, and the idea that the mythical elements are false becomes somewhat obsolete when we realise that all literature asks us to suspend our disbelief when we enter the world of the novel. In fact, one of the main characteristics of magical realism is that its magical elements are treated as an accepted part of life for the characters, without any sense of surprise or amazement. So by accepting these elements, the reader is also coerced into accepting the political message alongside it.

Magical realism could, however, place a barrier between the reader and the text if it alludes to something of which the reader has no knowledge. In Midnight’s Children the ominous image of the Green Widow refers to India’s former Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who is depicted as a witch in the novel: “the Widow’s hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black”.

Politically, this could refer to President Nixon’s description of Indira as an “old witch”, whilst the emphasis on her hand draws attention to the flag of the Indian National Congress Party. Rushdie’s criticism of Indira’s government may not be obvious to a reader who is unfamiliar with Indian politics, so wouldn’t a straightforward criticism be more accessible than the portrayal of a magical witch? Essentially, no, otherwise the text could be construed as simply propaganda, and we would lose the force of emotion behind Rushdie’s description. It is far more likely that readers will empathize with the text if it is pitched at a personal level, rather than making a generic statement. This is why Rushdie also makes extensive use of the magical realist aspect of Saleem’s face, which physically corresponds to India’s topographical features, as Saleem’s schoolteacher points out: “Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing [of Pakistan]; and thees horrible stained left cheek, the West! … Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!” Even his oversized nose represents the shape of India itself.

The use of magical realism in this way draws particular attention to the section of text Rushdie wants us to look at, as the fantastic is easily discerned from the realistic. Rushdie uses vivid descriptions

(such as that of the Green Widow) to invite the reader into unpacking his metaphor and discovering the message behind it. Far from alienating the reader, the magical elements draw the reader into the text and provoke further examination and exploration. Rushdie defends his use of magical realism, saying: “I think of fantasy as a method of producing intensified images of reality … one thing that is valuable in fiction is to find techniques for making actuality more intense, so that you experience it more intensely in the writing than you do out-

Indira Gandhi, PM of India 1966-1977 and 1980-1984. side the writing”. So for Rushdie, magical realism and mythical elements do not obscure reality, but in fact intensify it, whilst the narrative’s dreamlike feel and disjointed structure provide a better representation of the way that human memory and perception function than a linear and organised narrative would.

Unreliable narration is another problem. If the author can invent magical aspects of the world he is writing about, how will the reader know if any of it is a truthful depiction? This can render the author untrustworthy, and so any political ideas that he wishes to bring across will be doubted. Of course this can be explained by the fact that any political message will be based on opinion anyway, no matter how it is presented.

However, Rushdie also takes care to elucidate how something mythical can be true without it necessarily being real. In Midnight’s Children, he describes what seems to be a perfect manifesto for magical realism: “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same”, because

literature truth is something that can be found in stories or over the horizon in a painting.

This theory is put to use towards the end of the novel as Saleem and the other Midnight’s Children (now all nearing 30 years of age) become victim to the controversial forced sterilization campaign led by Indira’s son, Sanjay Gandhi. As they are captured and forced to undergo vasectomies and hysterectomies, they lose both their powers and the ability to reproduce others with such powers. As Saleem says: “She had cut [the magic] out of us”. In reality, the sterilisations were designed to curb the growing population, but in the novel it represents the removal of hope and the end to the potential good the Midnight’s Children could have achieved. It represents the oppression of the masses under authoritarian rule. The idea that the magic could be “cut out” of the children is not ‘real’ by Rushdie’s definition, but it is something is undeniably ‘true’, in the sense that their experience better represents the horror of the situation.

In Rushdie’s novels, it does seem that magical realism can be particularly effective in putting across a political message, as it can vivify and intensify reality whilst allowing something universal to be related on a personal level.

However, it can lend itself to misinterpretation. Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), landed him in trouble with the Muslim community, and a fatwa was issued against him calling for his assassination. His magic realist techniques portrayed the prophet Muhammad and the origins of Islam in what the Islamic world felt was a disrespectful manner, but of course to Rushdie, it was only fiction. Evidently his characters, despite their magical qualities (the two protagonists miraculously survive a fall from an aeroplane), were close enough to “reality” to provoke religious and political controversy. It proves that magical realism does not distance the reader so far from reality that political views cannot be brought across.

After being forced into hiding for several years as a result of the controversy, Rushdie re-emerged with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which again made extensive use of magical realism to represent ideas about the freedom of speech and struggles against censorship.

Despite its guise as a children’s story, the novel carries a powerful message about the act of storytelling, and fully embodies Rushdie’s idea that “redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it”.

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literature

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Cyberpunk: Still a Revolutionary Vision of the Future?

I

n 1984, American author William Gibson published Neuromancer, a novel that was to herald the arrival of a new and influential subgenre of science fiction: cyberpunk.

So what is, or was, “cyberpunk”?

Novels classified as cyberpunk are invariably set in a dystopian future, where the laws of an oppressive society are enforced by extensive computer technology. The “–punk” suffix refers to the heroes of the genre: lawless rebels who subvert the technological dominance of major corporations in order to scratch out an existence for themselves.

Although numerous authors contributed to the genre’s rapid expansion (in scope and influence) throughout the 1980s, Gibson soon rightly came to be recognised as the doyen of cyberpunk. Two further novels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), secured his position as leader of the cyberpunk revolution, completing a trilogy that is now known as his cyberspace sequence. To uncover the key ingredients of cyberpunk, however, one need look no further than his ground-breaking debut novel, the aforementioned Neuromancer.

Rather fittingly, given its publication in 1984, Neuromancer presents the reader with a dystopia that, although not an entirely Orwellian vision of the future, is just as terrifying and compelling in its scope. It is, as Stuart Moulthrop writes in his seminal essay “Hypertext and the Laws of Media”: “Nineteen EightyFour updated for 1984, the future somewhat gloomily surveyed from Reagan’s America.” Neuromancer is set in a near-future Earth: while its geography is dominated by the Sprawl, its commerce is run by faceless Japanese corporations known as “zaibatsus”. The book’s protagonist is Case, a computer cowboy who makes his living stealing from the megacorps, cruising through cyberspace in order to crack black ice— security programs that protect vital and potentially lucrative stores of data. Gibson’s plot owes much to the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler, except that in Neuromancer it is Case that is doing

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Tom Watson the cracking, not just a case that is being cracked. Gibson’s hero is offered a job—a big job, and one that cannot be refused—by a man ostensibly named Armitage. Who Case is really working for only gradually becomes clear. Chandler’s influence is also discernible in the novel’s

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Gibson was the first writer to embed the concept of an accessible, limitless virtual space into popular consciousness.

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hard-boiled, wisecracking dialogue, the pace of which rarely slows below a sprint. Take this exchange between Case and Molly, another of Armitage’s hired hackers: “You’re street samurai,” he said.

“How long you work for him?”

“Couple of months.”

“What about before that?”

“For somebody else. Working girl, you know?”

He nodded.

So far, so derivative, but it is the many exciting imaginative concepts

Cover design for Neuromancer

popularised by Gibson in Neuromancer that make the novel truly ground-breaking, supporting its claim to be the original work of cyberpunk fiction, both as a genre and an ethos. The most vital of these concepts is one with which we are all now familiar; so familiar, in fact, that its previous mention in this article will scarcely have raised an eyebrow. I speak, of course, of “cyberspace”, a word still unknown to the world only twenty-five years ago.

Although the concept of a limitless virtual space inhabited by data had been around for some time, the first recorded use of the term “cyberspace” to refer to such a realm appears in a short story by Gibson, published in Omni magazine in 1982. Gibson shows off his neologisms with abandon in Neuromancer, setting up patterns of usage that still operate today.

Witness Case, emerging from a lengthy venture into cyberspace: Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He’d been in cyberspace for five hours.

An alternative term used by Gibson for this virtual space has also, thanks to Keanu Reeves and the Wachowski brothers, become part of popular culture: The Matrix. For Case, as with Neo, the matrix is a place of excitement, providing its users with an addictive thrill that

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 keeps them coming back, despite the danger. Many of Gibson’s descriptions of Case draw attention to this compulsion: Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the matrix.

Call it what you will—cyberspace, the matrix, the Internet—one cannot escape the fact that Gibson was the first writer to embed the concept of an accessible, limitless virtual space into popular consciousness. His cyberspace trilogy leaves behind it both a conceptual and linguistic legacy, lending support to the claim that the most inspired science fiction novelists truly have the power to predict the future.

But despite the phenomenal success experienced by authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and many others, cyberpunk was to prove unsustainable as a literary genre, and by the early nineties many commentators were lamenting the “death of cyberpunk”. Gibson’s later novels, while still addressing themes of technological mastery, utilise a more conventional narrative style, and his increase in popularity has been accompanied by a move towards the mainstream of science fiction. Of his many acolytes, few still publish what could truly be termed cyberpunk novels. A telling example is that of Jonathan Littell, whose cyberpunk novel Bad Voltage (1989) stands incongruently alongside his only other published novel—the Prix Goncourt winning Les Bienveillantes (2006).

So was cyberpunk just another literary fad, a revolution that ended before it had begun to make any real impact? With so many of its key players quickly moving on to bigger and better things, it is indeed tempting to view it as such. Yet bizarrely, just as cyberpunk was in its death throes, the genre started gaining recognition from academia, with Stuart Moulthrop in particular adopting Gibson’s definition of cyberspace as: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the

human system.

Gratifying as this recognition undoubtedly was, the genre’s adoption by post-modernist academics effectively gave cyberpunk the kiss of death. The inevitable tag of “postcyberpunk” began to be bandied around, yet many fans found a way to keep the ethos of cyberpunk alive through the most natural of mediums—cyberspace itself. It is difficult to generalise about any group of loosely associated individuals, but a key demand of these self-styled cyberpunks is that technology be used for the dissemination and sharing of information. Like Case, the

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Neuromancer has inherited Chandler’s hard-boiled, wisecracking dialogue.

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original cyberpunk hero, modernday subscribers to the cyberpunk philosophy tend to distrust authority, and enjoy subverting new technologies developed by powerful multinational corporations.

In addition to this underground movement, Internet discussion groups devoted to cyberpunk as a literary genre still abound today.

However, it is important to remember that the exploration of the possibilities provided by cyberspace was far from being solely a fan’s phenomenon. As one would expect from the progenitor of cyberpunk, Gibson has embraced the possibilities provided by technology, rewarding his devotees with frequent blog entries and a self-erasing electronic poem entitled Agrippa (The Book of the Dead).

Cyberpunk’s appearance on the literary stage may have been a fleeting one, yet its legacy endures. Without it, there would be no trilogy of Matrix films, no such word as “cyberspace”, and the canon of twentieth-century literature would be missing some of its most imaginative and cutting-edge works. The ethos of cyberpunk survives amongst many web-based virtual communities, yet the genre owes its conception to a novel written entirely on a manual typewriter. If you haven’t yet done so, read Neuromancer tonight.

literature

“Scattered among a hundred cities” James MacDougald

W

. H. Auden, were he alive, would be 100 this year. He said once: “In spite of all this einsam rubbish, poets are no lonelier than anyone else. Poetry itself is lonely, of course, in the sense that few people read it.” This is typical Auden, levelling mythical superstructures with a single quip; honest to the bitter end, even when that honesty meant admitting the uselessness of his own occupation (‘poetry makes nothing happen’) or consigning a whole poem to the bin, as he did with ‘September 1, 1939’ because it was, as he put it, ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. But since his death in 1973 Auden’s reputation, which was dogged during his life by criticism of his flight to America after the beginning of the War, has enjoyed a popular revival. This renewed interest–an interest that is genuinely popular and not just scholarly–most probably rests on the appeal of just two poems from Auden’s entire output: “Stop all the clocks” and the previously mentioned “September 1, 1939”.

“September 1, 1939” has, by unspoken popular consensus, been appointed to the rarefied and privileged office of Poem which Sums up All Thoughts and Concerns on the Subject of–in this case–Anticipation of Conflict. It is a poem shot through with aphoristic rhetoric: “Low dishonest decade”, “waves of

“Auden” by Caroline Binch

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literature anger and fear”, “unmentionable odour of death”, “psychopathic god”, “the strength of Collective Man”, “Lost in a haunted wood”, “an affirming flame”–these phrases alone are enough to create the premonitory effect that floats this poem. The offending line–“We must love one another or die”–that so appalled Auden when he came to revise the poem, has, ironically, become perhaps the most celebrated line he ever wrote. Auden insisted the line was ‘a damned lie’: we die anyway, love or no love. It is difficult to fathom his pedantry on this point. The line is quite comfortable in its context. When Auden suggests we may die, he is clearly not referring to death as a consequence of natural causes, but to the imminent conflict with which the poem is concerned. Auden seems at all times to be irritated by the “romantic lie in the brain”, the potential of all art to become brazen, careless and fraudulent. He said that the male poet “tends to become an aesthete, to become too detached, to say things not because he believes them but because they sound effective.” Auden fought against this tendency throughout his whole poetic career. In the case of “September 1, 1939”, his dogma may have got the better of his rationality.

It is futile to pretend that “Stop all the clocks” (Twelve Songs, IX) does not owe its relatively widespread popularity to the recitation in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem’s final stanza demonstrates Auden’s characteristic manipulation of the diminished world: The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Auden’s imaginative leap straddles the divide between the enormity of the most conspicuous natural phenomena and the possibility of reducing the universe to a toy set. Whatever might boldly and thoughtlessly be asserted about the inimitable power of love or allengulfing nature of grief, there is a grand resonance in the first three lines which would correlate with almost any sentiment the last line contained. A similar effect is visible in “Lady, weeping at the crossroads”: the poet encourages the “lady” to “Stare the hot sun out of

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 heaven” and to “drink it [the ocean] dry”. Here the conceit is used differently–possibly as an ironic reproach to the lady’s self-structured romantic artifice (the last couplet runs: “Find the penknife there and plunge it / Into your false heart.”). The poem details the sort of stifling love-myth that Auden would probably have found insufferable.

Another of Auden’s best-loved poems, “Musée des Beaux Arts”, celebrates the canny artistic device of focusing away from a subject and onto incidental details so that the main subject is, perversely, enhanced:

where. The absolute and uncompromising shift in the final stanza of “The Fall of Rome” is perhaps the best example of this focal drift; far from pathetic, the tone is decidedly ominous:

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Auden began writing poetry during a time of unprecedented artistic upheaval. The Modernists were in full stride and traditional verse-forms were quickly becoming obsolete. Auden was quite unfazed. Stating happily that mastery of vers-libre was beyond him, he continued to write metric verse. From his first published work he made it clear by his language and chosen subjectmatter that he was willing to advance the cause of modern poetry in more thoughtful and enduring ways than the short-sighted tinkering of the Modernists. In retrospect, the figure of Auden stands arm-in-arm with Robert Lowell at the narrowest point of the twentieth century. Lowell was the great innovator, the democrat, who dissolved the last of the obstructive requirements of form and subject. His legacy is freeverse as we know it now. Auden was the rejuvenator of traditional verse-forms, making them palatable for a modern readership. Today, both legacies are respected in equal measure. Auden was the consummate versifier and, consequently, the obvious and suitable elegist of those whose deaths he recounted in his poems, including, most notably, Sigmund Freud, Henry James and W. B. Yeats.

Auden uses this technique again in “At the Grave of Henry James”, when he comments in a very off-hand manner on blue puddles which “echo such clouds as occur / To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the assing moment remarks

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Poetry makes nothing happen they repeat”. Again, the effect engendered by these sideways glances is, loosely, pathos. Auden seems to be sold on the idea that a poem’s focus should occasionally drift from the object of contemplation in order to provide perspective and a sense of what is going on else-

Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

“The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

politics

What Can Be Done in Iraq?

I

t is a sad yet understandable truth that most people switch off when they hear the word ‘Iraq’. As I research this article, I read that a lorry has been driven into the heart of the old Sadriya market of central Baghdad. It was carrying an entire ton of explosives, extraordinary even by Baghdad standards. The explosion ripped through the crowded marketplace, shattering stalls and leaving a huge crater which was the grave for one hundred and thirty people. It injured a further three hundred. Despite the fact that this death toll was more than double that of the July 7 th London bombings (which killed fifty-two), it is highly unlikely that you will recall the incident. On the day it occurred your eyes, like mine, may have flittered over the headline, blank and unsurprised, but that would be it.

That very same day, gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint killing six and injuring a further six. In Kirkuk, seven car bombs ripped through the centre of the city, killing five and injuring forty.

The latter two events would not have even made the news if it had not been for the Sadriya market bombing—journalists like to provide a little context. The chances of one percent of the British or US population recalling these incidents are extremely slim. This is

Toby Smith not because we don’t care. It is just that so unexceptional are these killings in the plethora of sectarian violence that is modern Iraq, so regular are the reports of massacres, kidnappings and atrocities, that such events have become background noise. Much like Vietnam, it has become the grim shadow that hangs over the country which everyone would like to forget.

However, this does not mean

Iraq is forgotten, nor of course that it should be. Individual incidents may blur but the knowledge of the overall quagmire of death and

11—the arms trade 13—silent slavery: the forgotten trade 15—what price utopia? the case of euthanasia

politics

ALSO IN THIS SECTION

destruction does not. Politicians in America and the UK who instigated or supported the war are paying a bitter price. George Bush faces approval rates as low as 28%—comparable in recent history only to Nixon just before his resignation over Watergate. The President has paid the price with the loss of both the House and the Senate. Tony Blair’s legacy is unlikely to ever recover from the stain of Iraq— whether Gordon Brown’s will at the next election remains to be seen.

That Labour is already consistently lagging behind the Tories in the polls is an indication.

But for all the political ramifications, the question of what on earth to do in Iraq still echoes through the corridors of Congress and Parliament with no genuinely acceptable answer. There is a good reason for this: there is not one.

This is why we find it painful to pay attention to the day to day events in Iraq. Whether to go to war or not raised passions—both sides of the argument were offering positives: liberation of Iraq and removal of its WMDS on the one hand and not going to war on the other. In finding a way out of the Iraq crisis there is no right side to choose. We are faced instead with the choice between the bad and the ugly.

Neither the phased withdrawal of troops desired by many of the Democrats, nor the 20,000 troop increase advocated by Bush and the Pentagon is an easy solution. It is foolishness to suggest anything to the contrary. Each is an extraordinary gamble. Both options could easily and bloodily fail. The only difference is that withdrawal by the coalition no longer gambles US and British lives, just Iraqi ones.

Various other ‘radical’ solutions besides withdrawal and escalation have been proposed by more peripheral commentators. However these are, sadly, primarily based in fantasy. The most commonly proposed is to divide Iraq into three sections: the Kurdish north, Shia south and Sunni centre. However, this is ludicrous on the most rudimentary levels as Iraq is not divid-

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Warplanes over the desert: despite a huge technological advantage, coalition forces are still struggling against the Iraqi insurgency. ed on neat ethnic lines. Much of it is a mix of Sunni and Shia. Any move towards an independent Kurdish state would also invite fierce opposition from Turkey.

Short of ethnically cleansing swathes of Iraq it is impossible.

An approach more based in reality, proposed by the Iraq Study Group in America, is to engage Syria and Iran diplomatically and thus attempt to stem the flow of terrorists, weapons and support for sectarian groups. However, tensions between America and Iran over nuclear proliferation make such an action extremely unlikely.

And even without the nuclear dynamic, the diplomatic relations between America, Syria and Iran are just not strong enough to make any real, noticeable difference.

Thus there is only one real question, should we withdraw troops or increase their numbers? Given the lack of any easy solution, it is a difficult dilemma. Maybe we are seeing the beginnings of an answer with the troop withdrawals recently announced by Blair. However, whilst it may reflect that the political wind is starting to blow towards

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exit we cannot read too much into an announcement that a mere 1,500 troops are being removed. It is an irrelevance compared to America’s current 130,000 and a potential 20,000 more on the way.

Proponents of an increase in troops believe that new tactics and a “surge” of extra soldiers will finally secure the country.

However, one must look at this rationally. There will be no surge in troop numbers—they will come slowly and predictably.. It will represent little more than a 15 percent increase—less than that if more UK forces pull out. I have made the direness of the situation abundantly clear, so will a 15 percent increase really make that much difference? Of course not.

This is made very evident by the new offensive of General Petraneus, an “expert in counterinsurgency”, who has just become the new head of US troops in Iraq.

Last week he began a massive operation to “retake Baghdad”. The operation is still in its initial stages of ‘clear’ and ‘hold’ and thus the troop concentration is massive— unsustainable and deliberately

short term. Yet on the first Sunday several huge car bombs killed 60.

On Monday three suicide bombers killed many more. If attacks of this intensity are still occurring when such a huge portion of troops are deployed, the question begs of how on earth the coalition is ever going to reach the third stage of ‘retainment’ across Baghdad, let alone the whole of Iraq, however many troops are committed. Increasing troops by fifteen percent is as futile an act as trying to take down a Humvee with a pebble Supporters of troop increases cite the supposed alternative: civil war and a vacuum of power.

However, one is very entitled to yell back in the face of this argument that such an event will not begin when troops leave Iraq—it began when they first set foot in Iraq nearly 4 years ago.

It is a fair point. So far the occupation has cost between 55,000 and 655,000 lives, sectarian violence represents the vast majority of this. The former figure is from Iraq Body Count, a campaign group and the latter the findings of a group of US scientists recently published in the Lancet. The inexactitude is indicative of the chaos ensuing: when people cannot agree on whether 600,000 people died or not it is difficult to argue that something is not currently seriously wrong, and that a vacuum of power does not already exist. The government of Iraq is the government of the green zone. Democracy exists there and nowhere else.

Thus, the major detractors of the phased withdrawal option are missing the point. Major chaos will occur with or without troop withdrawal. The only hope Iraq has for genuine stability is a government which holds real legitimacy, and hence authority. This will never be the case for a government which is propped up by foreign troops alone.

If coalition troops withdraw, the vacuum will widen. But then it will be filled. Whether this is by the current Iraqi government with a newly found legitimacy or violent sectarian groups is the real question, though few would place their bets on the current incumbents.

In order to give the current Iraqi rulership some chance we must

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 spend another one to two years training Iraqi troops and increasing their involvement. They have been plagued with a lack of efficiency and discipline. However, unlike the police, they have stayed politically loyal. In the South, the UK is withdrawing out of the cities and the Iraqi troops are beginning to take over with some success. The south, however, suffers from little Sunni insurgency or al-Qaeda terrorism compared to Baghdad and the centre of the country. Anyone must be doubtful about their ability to secure the entire of Iraq. But, we have an obligation to give them a chance, however slim, and thus we must remain to continue their training for some time yet. Yet this does not mean that escalation is the answer. To give them any chance we must integrate them more and more into the running of security. We cannot principally use them as back up troops, then suddenly ‘cut and run’ when the Republicans are ousted from power next election.

I have spent long deliberating over the question “What is the solution to the Iraq crisis?” and I have come to the conclusion that there is very little room for optimism; instead one is presented with a choice between cynicism and naivety.

A continued coalition presence must be maintained to allow Iraqi troops further time to prepare. But we must reduce our numbers, albeit slowly, handing more and more responsibility to the Iraqi army. Our occupation, be it with 130,000 or 150,000 troops, will never rectify the dire security situation. This must be acknowledged.

The slow transfer of power does not promise success but our sticking around guarantees only a perpetuation of failure. Kicking a stone wall at a dead end, however hard you try, is never going to yield a breakthrough, just more pain.

Doubtless the Middle East wants more freedom, even democracy, but it will not be imposed on it by the West. Every attempt to do so just makes any such hope more distant. Whether the superpowers of the world will ever bear heed to this is questionable. The lessons of Iraq will be soon forgotten, maybe even sooner than we might think.

politics

The Arms Trade Death for Profit or a Fair Deal?

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he global arms trade is the largest sector of spending in the world. It is worth around a trillion dollars annually, a figure that corresponds to about $170 for every person on the planet, and increases every year. The income generated for producers of weapons is massive, and the geopolitical importance of strategic arms sales cannot be overstated. At what costs do we pursue economic and strategic supremacy using this deadly trade? Can we ever justify such actions?

The answer depends on how you see the world. To state the obvious, guns kill. Armed conflict kills approximately half a million people every year, the vast majority of whom are civilians. According to the Control Arms campaign, a life is ended in armed confrontation every single minute. Startlingly, most of these casualties are caused by small arms such as guns, grenades, land mines and light missiles. The misuse of weaponry in the hands of both governmental and independent forces leads to atrocities such as genocide, hostage taking and rape, not to mention unnecessary military deaths. To add fuel to the fire, the arms trade is not selective: anyone with sufficient finance can acquire firearms and ammunition, regardless of whether they are terrorists, police or criminals. It is well documented that the West has sold weapons to Turkey, where they were used against the Kurdish population in some of the worst human rights violations of recent times. Guns sold legitimately can end up in the hands of some of the world's most feared organisations, such as AlQaeda and Hezbollah.

How can we assault the legitimacy of the arms trade? It would be naïve to suggest that removing the supply of armaments would cause a cessation of conflict in the world's most troubled areas. History has demonstrated the effectiveness of low-grade and improvised weaponry in countries such as Iraq, Rwanda and Israel, where

Robin Jervis makeshift explosives, machetes and homemade rockets have been employed to devastating effect.

Moreover, the sale of munitions to putative freedom fighters living under despotic regimes could even be seen as heroism. Would we question the supply of arms to resistance movements in the Second World War?

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A life is ended in armed confrontation every single minute.

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There is much more to this issue than meets the eye. The real harm of the arms trade lies below the bloody veneer of casualty statistics and human rights violations.

According to Oxfam, the world spends under $60 billion per year on aid, a mere fraction of the trillion dollars spent on weapons and ammunition. The figures are damning -the vast majority of sales are to developing countries that simply cannot afford to purchase them.

They rely instead on loans, which could be used to improve the standards of living.

Pakistan, a country where a quarter of people live below the poverty line, spends half of its budget on defence. This expenditure is hardly necessary for security- Tanzania, for example, spent $40 million on high-tech radar systems, which are wholly inappropriate for their security requirements. Oxfam states that the amount of money spent could have assured healthcare for 3.5 million people. As President Eisenhower once remarked, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who

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politics hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children".

The financial costs of dealing with the effects of gun use are substantial. The International Action Network on Small Arms, IANSA, claims that in El Salvador the cost of treating gunshot victims makes up 7% of the public hospital budget, scarce resources which could be used in health education and treatment of disease, both essential factors for development. The InterAmerican Development Bank estimates that the cost of gun violence in Latin America in the 1990s was equivalent to 14% of regional GDP, and non-governmental organisations place the cost of armed conflict in Uganda at $100 million per year. Whose fault is this? Blame can be firmly placed on weapons producers in the West. Only four countries, Bulgaria, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have denied weapons sales on the grounds that they harm development. Those countries who continue to supply choose to inflict a double penalty on innocent civilians: not only by selling a

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 potent means of suffering to their governments and rebel groups, but also by denying them the aid and assistance that they sorely need.

Historically, it seems this trade can be justified. In the recent past, the Cold War was the rationale behind any morally questionable, yet highly effective policies. Arms sales to Africa could be argued as an effort to keep a particular country 'on side', the long-term welfare of the populations of these countries being a secondary concern. In the suppliers' defence, desperate times call for desperate measures.

However, since the fall of the Berlin wall, does this constitute a legitimate foreign policy? The United States, United Kingdom and France all supplied arms to Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, reasoning that a victorious Iraq would be the lesser of two evils in comparison to the destabilising power of a victorious post-revolutionary Iran.

Nonetheless, they also sold weapons, albeit less overtly, to Iran. Notwithstanding the human rights violations of both sides, the logic of helping out the preferred country collapses when arms are supplied to the enemy as well, serving only to demonstrate the immoral nature of this horrendous trade.

Geopolitical justification can remain, even if the moral grounds behind it are dubious or inconsistent. In this Hobbesian world of international relations there appears to be no reason why a country should not do whatever it can to secure its position. If they can make a vast profit in the process, so much the better.

Armaments are highly desirable goods for leaders across the globe, and therefore a valuable tool for securing cooperation and friendship. Arms sales to Turkey illustrate this-the use of the weapons when received is irrelevant, because the suppliers now have access to a vital geo-strategic site at the fringe of the Middle East, a conduit for troops and, perhaps more crucially, oil. In spite of this, humanitarian intervention as in Somalia and in Iraq, has often been criticised when one of the key objectives has been to bring democracy, equality and security.

If we cannot justify this, how can we justify a trade where there is obvious and absolute detriment to the country in question?

It is all very well to argue about the immorality of the arms trade, but in practise there is little that can be done. The United Nations is in the process of constructing an

Arms sold on the international market often find their way to terrorist milias across the world.

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 arms trade treaty, which would impose strict limits on people wishing to purchase weapons. Thus far, The United States has been the only country to vote against the treaty. It is perhaps a curious coincidence that , the United States accounts for more arms sales than the next three suppliers combined.

Unfortunately, the United States can easily choose to disregard the chastisements of the United Nations, as it demonstrated when it invaded Iraq in 2003. It is unlikely that an international treaty would have any effect were it not to be endorsed by the United States, since any kind of economic or military sanction would have massive negative effects for the rest of the world. Without any effective world order which can hold countries to account, there is no way in which the movement of armaments can be effectively monitored and regulated. Given the current trends in sales, it is unlikely that any individual country would choose selfimposed arms control legislation.

Furthermore, there is a significant alternative trade in arms. Legal loopholes are often exploited by private entrepreneurs in order to sell arms to rogue states, criminal gangs or paramilitary groups. Enduser certificates, in theory a concrete way to control a weapon's ultimate destination, are often faked or simply ignored, since there is no practical way to verify them. The IANSA states that 80% of arms in Mexico were originally sold legally in the United States.

Prospects appear bleak for those hoping for a change in the status quo. As long as there are profits and political gains to be made by supplying arms, and no effective way to police the trade, there is no incentive for governments and private companies to stop; however immoral, and ultimately deadly, their actions may be. Essentially, weaponry is a necessity for governments worldwide. The idea of each country domestically manufacturing its own arms is as absurd as it is undesirable, due to the economic efficiency of production and the incapability of some countries to produce the required hardware.

Therefore, the arms trade is as unavoidable as the possession of arms themselves.

politics

Silent Slavery The Forgotten Trade

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f you are celebrating this year as the bicentennial of an end to slave trading in this country, you are celebrating a false cessation. In our consciousness, the dust which covers the exchange of human life as property also buries the fascinations of ancient wars, witch hunts and the bubonic plague. The two-hundredth anniversary of its abolition is far too late a date to scrape away this forgetful apparition and finely scrutinise the wretched reality underneath. Today, slavery is still thriving and alive beneath the surface.

The prohibition of slavery, now effectively the case in all nations, is merely a statement of opinion if a government cannot back it up. As a commitment, it must be enforced with the same authoritative might as is wielded in the search for terrorists or paedophiles. Without fervently striving to defeat it, a legal opposition to people as property is simply hypocrisy.

Whilst no modern country recognises the right to own another human being, few do their utmost to prevent it taking place. In fact, there is little enough will to ascertain its prevalence across the world. The task of generating opposition to, or even awareness of, slavery is left to groups such as the Anti-Slavery Society and disparate government departments (as in the U.K.). There is also an occasional thrashing and panting of enthusiasm from a politician in need of a non-partisan or unifying topic of discussion.

Tony Blair—no doubt for unrelated reasons—said the following on January 23rd of this year: “It is vital that we reflect on the past and that we look to the future. The spirit of freedom, justice and equality that characterised the efforts of the abolitionists is the same spirit that drives our determination to fight injustice and inequality today. People and child trafficking is an abhorrent modern form of slavery that we are committed to tackling. Signing the [European Council’s] Convention will enable us to give victims every support and strengthen our efforts to prosecute traffickers.”

Being “committed to tackling” the

Peter Hagen problem, Mr. Blair has generously felt able to announce “a national service at Westminster Abbey, the launch of a £2 coin to mark the anniversary and the issue of stamps bearing anti-slavery campaigners”. His major pledge in place to prevent contemporary slave trading mentioned in the text above was Britain’s support for the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings.

He also issued a “public statement of sorrow” on the 27th November 2006.

These policies are a contrast to that of the 21st May 2001, when his government, along with those of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, blocked the passage of a European Union apology for slavery. Whilst the recent effort is obviously a step in a propitious direction, no authority, not even the E.U. or U.N., exists with the teeth to tear apart the corrupt tissues of organised crime which orchestrate the captivation and exchange of human beings for profit.

The United Kingdom’s government, like many others, has been ineffective in enforcing its two-hundred year old commitment, certainly in comparison to the vigour of certain other foreign policy areas. The evidence of slavery being a global and national pandemic is considerable, although estimates of the number held in a state of unfreedom naturally vary according to definition and disposition. They are generally between that of the advocacy group Free the Slaves at 27 million people and the 200 million of less cautious organisations. Moreover, the Anti-Slavery Society’s figures show an increase in the cross-border trade of slaves in 2003—a figure which does not list sales within nations. They reveal that the current number is the greatest ever to have existed in history—although this must be corroborated by the continual global demographic explosion. The current number held in slavery is actually the lowest ever as a percentage of the world’s population. But its existence is undeniable.

United Nations peacekeepers in

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politics Africa have acknowledged the widespread extent of undisguised slavery in Sudan. The advocacy group Free The Slaves reports that in Mali a young male agricultural labourer can be obtained for as little as U.S. $40, whereas in Thailand the price for an H.I.V.-free prostitute can be as high as U.S. $1,000 (plus an upkeep including the narcotics on which they are often kept). This fee is often one which attracts impoverished parents to part with their children—or even to have children for the purpose of selling them into ownership and oppression.

The child soldiers in countries like The Democratic Republic of the Congo are a well-known example. However, they are a minute, if barbarically treated, proportion. There are also sex-slaves, trafficked to developed nations, as well as the strong demands for industrial or agricultural hands in Africa, Asia and South America. They are forced to work under the most degrading yokes of bondage—charcoal extraction in Brazil, brick making in Pakistan, or even inhumanly long hours selling water in Mauritania.

For those who organise these atrocities, there are massive economic benefits in owning and putting to work a subjugated labourer. As a slave holder in any nation today, you could expect a profit of 800% per unit. This, along with the ready supply of new slaves, means that the victims can be regarded as “disposable people” (the title of Kevin Bale’s authoritative text on the issue). Very quickly an owner or pimp can break-even on their property, and afford to leave them on the streets of a city once they have contracted HIV, become pregnant, or met whatever grisly end is likely with the task into which they are brutally coerced.

This is often the domestic symptom which is evident to our social services or media in the UK. Barnardo’s regularly publishes reports on the severity and consequences of prostitution— especially amongst children—and the influx of people into Britain’s brothels and darker havens of corruption. It invariably describes the stigma associated with helping these victims, who are tarnished as “undeserving poor” and cannot be reached or withdrawn from their servitude.

Amongst the few successes has been the conviction of three people in July 2006 for running a “massage parlour” in Birmingham, euphemistically named Cuddles. The raid of its prem-

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 ises in 2005 revealed nineteen women, sustained on narcotics and birth control pills whilst earning huge profits for the three owners who are now behind bars. It is a familiar story for young and poor eastern-European women: they were enticed by the promise of respectable jobs in the UK, only to be sold into the sex trade.

What the media were not so effective in reporting, however, was that immediate action was taken to repatriate six of these women, with only a brief pause “for time and support to recov-

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Without fervently striving to defeat it, a legal opposition to people as property is simply hypocrisy.

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er and reflect”. No guarantee can be made that they will not be ground back into the desperation which first led them into slavery.

However, even with the fairest assessment of the right to asylum for victims of human trafficking, these social problems are symptoms at the end of the process. On the global scale, a report by the United States’ government in 2003 suggested that those shipped across borders in that year numbered between 800,000 and 900,000. However, due to the illegal and underground nature of this monster, no firm description of its magnitude can be made. It is an unknown phantom, stretched between the known and the submerged, unspeakably beyond the capability of language to express—and most often outside the glimpses of brutality seen in the periphery of the media.

Language is often the basis for criticism against the Anti-Slavery movement. The definition of “slavery” is often bent beyond its literal, and practical, sense. It is true that Great Britain no longer participates in the marketplace of tiny lives which pass between oppressive owner and abusive slave-holder, and will prosecute those whom it finds to be engaged in this practise. In this sense, our legislative obligation of 1807 is handsomely fulfilled. But it is a very narrow atti-

tude which abides by ancient conceptions and does not encompass an expansion in the number of sexslaves, child soldiers and other modern forms of human chattel. Language is again one of the main inhibitors to the issue of contemporary slavery exploding onto political agendas.

The most pertinent definition of slavery provided by the Oxford English Dictionary is “the condition or fact of being entirely subject to, or under the domination of, some power or influence”. This offers something far more than is conjured up by thoughts of 1807. It is quite safe to say that within this definition fall the abuses of debt bondage (unfree labour to pay off loan-sharks), sex-trafficking and enforced prostitution.

However, by no means are these perverted new phenomena emerging in the world’s economy railed against in the same voracious way as the immorality of formal indenture in the 19th Century. So disparate a crisis, lacking even a coherent verbal definition, requires a William Wilberforce capable of transcending the closely guarded boundaries of sovereign nations, uniting the global economic market and even overcoming the inadequacy of how we describe the enemy.

Besides these barriers, it would also be foolish to suggest that slavery can be tackled independently from the blights of organised crime or drugs trafficking. Unlike these, though, its annual gross economic product across the globe is around U.S. $13 billion—a tiny proportion of the crimes with which it is associated. Its complete abolition would not cripple a single economy—and any adverse consequences could certainly not be criticised where there is such a strong moral imperative for action.

Evidence that it can be dealt with is clear in the ‘Cocoa Protocol’ (or, more accurately, the Harkin-Engel Protocol), formally signed in 2001. It committed the chocolate industry to preventing the worst forms of child and adult slavery in the growing and harvesting of cocoa for consumption in countries like the United Kingdom and United States (whose commitment is naturally a key factor).

Involved in the agreement were not only the representatives of relevant governments and NGOs, but also the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant,

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 Catering and Tobacco Allied Workers Associations (IUF) and the National Consumers League. It has gone a long way towards eradicating the use of unfree labour in cocoa picking in West Africa and elsewhere, proving that international cooperation, where achieved, can be effective.

This begs the question: if there is no incentive to keep it, and if efforts like the Cocoa Protocol have succeeded in prevented it—why has no global movement stood in its way? Aside from the inseparability of slavery from drug economies, crime-lords and international fraud, as well as its slipperiness as a concept, there is no doubt that there is difficulty in coordinating any means of combating it.

Most importantly, such an undertaking requires the teeth to cross borders and bring to justice the individuals responsible. Facilitated by a lack of an invigorated opposition, slave trading continues to be the sibling of narcotic smuggling and internationally organised crime—Globalisation’s bastard, but not insuperable, children.

The issue of a vibrant world slave market is similar to that of climate change in the limited sense that national commitments and pledges, or even those imposed from a supranational level like the E.U., are tiny fillets fighting something far larger and more insidious than individual projects can hope to make an impact upon. If a solution is to be found, apologies like the “public statement of sorrow” issued by Tony Blair should be accompanied by a commitment to spearheading an international fight against such a degrading form of oppression. To be effective, the involvement is essential not only of governments, but precisely those who made effective the Cocoa Protocol: NGOs, producers, and industry representatives. But no such progress can be made without the political will, which, ultimately, must be motivated by a public desire to see change.

Initially, then, for an effective international solution, there must first be a global whipping up of support similar to those which have begun to whirl around the towering heights of AIDS, Third World poverty and climate change. Advertisement, awareness, and ultimately abject outrage are now desperately needed in fighting the inferno of human slavery and its symbiotic corruption, still raging beneath our myopic social radar.

politics

What Price Utopia?

The Right to Choose or the Right to Life in the case of Euthanasia

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echnological advances have rid humanity of many of its most malignant scourges. Some diseases, like Smallpox, have been virtually eradicated. Ancient killers like Measles, Rubella, and Polio have been tamed beyond recognition, in the ‘developed’ world at least. There are even optimistic whispers among the scientific community of the “Achilles’ heel of HIV” revealing a potential Aids vaccine. Science however, has only stretched so far.

Millions of hearts will break tonight as loved ones slip from their grasp.

Many families will watch in agony as those closest to them slowly crumble into a coma or vegetative state; stripped of dignity, paralysed by pain, an incapacitated shell of their former selves. Technology cannot save all. Many diseases remain simply incurable, and for sufferers of debilitating terminal diseases like Cystic Fibrosis, Dementia or Muscular Sclerosis the medical community can do no more than extend the quantity of life. Tragically, this prolonged quantity is invariably to the detriment of its quality. Medical advances still fail to unite the two. In the face of this trauma and heartbreak few answers are proposed.

As part of his pioneering vision of utopia St. Thomas More “envisaged such a community as one that would facilitate the death of those whose lives had become burdensome as a result of ‘torturing and lingering pain’.” Euthanasia—“the deliberate killing of a person for the benefit of that person”—remains a hidden theme in twenty-first century Britain, an ‘on-again off-again’ story which is rarely directly addressed in decision-making circles. It is a controversial, highly charged conjunction of moral and political arguments and inspires great passion and emotion. Everyone has an opinion on this subject. Everyone knows of someone who has suffered. Yet the debate remains relatively muffled.

Some countries, in a moment of lucidity not afforded to British officials, have legalised variants of euthanasia.

Switzerland, the

Robert Perkins Netherlands, and the US state of Oregon have all liberalised their assisted suicide laws. Despite the 2007 British Attitudes Survey demonstrating that 80% of the British public would favour the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia, the British government remains lamentably neutral on the subject.

Embedded in emotion and subjective morality, euthanasia’s controversy stifles scrutiny and it appears a virtual taboo for medics and legislators alike.

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Human beings have the right to independent selfdetermination, and while a right to death per se is much disputed

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The central ethical argument for voluntary euthanasia is that “respect for persons demands respect for their autonomous choices as long as those choices do not result in harm to others”. The belief in freedom of choice is the belief that each human being should be the ultimate arbiter of their own existence. Human beings have the right to independent self-determination, and while a right to death per se is much disputed, “For many dying patients, the major source of distress is having their autonomous wishes frustrated”. This month, 30 year old Kelly Taylor has mounted a legal case for euthanasia after her living will asking doctors not artificially feed or hydrate her was rejected. Mrs Taylor is in continuous and considerate pain from a congenital heart defect and a spinal disorder, and she is seeking relief.

She says, “Enough is enough…I don’t

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politics want to suffer any more…My consultant has told me that he does not expect me to live for another year. In that time I will deteriorate and that deterioration will become quite undignified. I want to avoid that”. In the grip of unendurable suffering and pain, the terminal disease with which patients are stricken reduces their capacity to control most decisions.

Many believe that life is too precious to be dispelled under any circumstances, and are morally opposed to the curtailing of life under any circumstances. Some believe that the right to remove life is one that only greater beings can possess, and that euthanasia is violates the fundamental value of human life.

This argument is eloquently outlined

by Malcolm Muggeridge, who claimed that, “This life in us … is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out …. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other”. The secular interpretation of the right to life, as represented by Bioethicist Brian Patton, argues that not only is suffering so subjective that it can never be conclusively determined as ‘unbearable’, but that when palliative care is so effective it would be impossible for doctors to sanction euthanasia, even on a case-by-case basis. Patton’s objections are curious. Firstly, it is true that pain and despair can never be objective, but that surely justifies the right of individuals autonomously dictating their own standards of quality. External judgment of the level of Kelly Taylor’s pain is facetious, and to undermine her capacity to tolerate pain is to do her a great injustice as a sovereign human being. Assuming competence, the opinions of the patient must carry the greatest weight; it adds insult to considerable injury to impose a quality of life onto them.

Secondly, it is more than just a concern to alleviate suffering that leads patients to consider their desire to die. A powerful motivation is to preserve dignity, one of the many casualties of a fiercely debilitating condition. Many people do not wish to live their lives under the continuous care of hospices, regardless of quality. It is a question of stan-

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 dard of living. Whether the belief in the right to life is founded in religious or atheist belief frameworks, it simply remains that it is not the decision of anyone but the patient themselves to make. Freedom to choose is fundamentally about placing the right to decide in the hands of the person who is ultimately affected the most. However wellintentioned, to restrict the choice completely is to inflict one person’s moral framework onto others. To provide the choice does not detract from those who wish to decline the option of euthanasia, or those who feel that life should not be compromised in that fashion. Euthanasia, if legalised, would allow those who share this conviction to abstain, either as doctor or as patient. To impose euthanasia would be equally wrong; nevertheless, the opposite case is our current status-quo, and does not work in the best interests of those directly concerned.

The debate that I have briefly outlined is dealing with extremely subjective application of extremely general principles, and the championing of the right to choose blankets over many caveats and considerations.

The right to choose may be suited to Mrs Taylor, but what of those who have no Living Will? What of those who lose the mental and physical capability to articulate their will?

What happens to those who have not articulated a long-standing commitment regarding their desire to die, and have changed their mind once the disease takes hold? Who makes the decision in the case of children?

It is an area that is fraught with complications, and any move towards legalisation must not increase the vulnerability these people.

Euthanasia must work to the patient’s advantage and not at their expense. There have been attempts to create a flexible framework to satisfy some of these fears, such as Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s Five Individually Necessary Conditions. Euthanasia must be cautiously regulated, and those who oppose euthanasia raise many considerable obstacles and fears. In 2006 a poll carried out by Communicate Research indicated that 73% of the public “agreed that such a law would ‘make it more difficult to detect rogue doctors such as Dr Harold Shipman’”. The paranoia

stirred by notorious cases like Dr. Shipman and Dr. Kevorkian is understandable. Fear of abuse is natural in the eventuality of any liberalisation and relaxing of existing restrictions, and must remain a key priority were any system to be introduced. The legalisation of euthanasia is bound to be fraught with complexity and controversy. That however is no reason to shy away from seeking a solution.

In the meantime, victims of catastrophic disease and disaster like Reg Crew are forced to suffer unnecessary and unwanted pain. Reg Crew died of Motor Neurone Disease in 2003. The testimony of his wife Win on the Death with Dignity website attests to “a living hell…Palliative care did little for him. His dignity was stripped away, each time the disease closed down another part of his body, and so was his independence”. Where suffering and pain is so great that our considerable medical prowess is rendered irrelevant we have no response but a retreat to palliative care and nursing the victims of catastrophic disease into the shadows of eventual death.

Euthanasia would provide an answer

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To provide the choice does not detract from those who wish to decline the option of euthanasia, or those who feel that life should not be compromised in that fashion.

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to the patient’s torment, and would bring a compassionate end to their suffering. In the circumstances where euthanasia would be desired, “death is no longer considered to be the enemy, but rather as a friend who will deliver the patient”.

Euthanasia derives from the Greek for “good-death”, and in the name of compassion, it is perhaps time to consider its introduction in Britain.

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Globalisation debate

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lobalisation has been one of the most defining features of the past two centuries: it has integrated capital and goods markets, shrunk the world as we know it and to some brought wealth and prosperity, to others misery. If you have an opinion on the subject it is likely to be a strong one. Each of the following three articles looks at it from a different perspective. Daniel Sjöström takes a meta approach, questioning the assumed universality of capitalism and globalisation.

Nicholas Fisher sums up some of the main themes, arguing that although globalisation can bring ills it also promises great prosperity.

Raoul Lundberg asks us to move away from our unquestioning belief in globalisation as an almost natural phenomenon, and to instead recognise that we have a choice-a point often disguised by the mysticism of the term. Each offers an intriguing insight into an ambiguous and contentious yet most important concept: globalisation.

Toby Smith, editor.

ALSO IN THIS SECTION 20—globalisation: misguided or mistrusted?

21—globalisation: what is it, and do we want it?

globalisation debate

Globalisation and the Supposed Universality of Western Values

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henever globalisation is debated, the arguments generally fall (very) broadly into two categories: the Marxist and the liberal. The Marxist view is that globalisation is a form of exploitation, even colonisation. The liberal view is that the opening up of free markets allows progress in the poorest parts of the world: modern capitalism will lead to stronger economies, wealth generation, more equality and greater cooperation the world over. In this article, I will challenge both views.

It is hard to dispute that modern capitalism is enormously expansive, and has been extremely successful in its pervasion of world culture. Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, that “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” The two broad views suggested above draw very different conclusions about capitalism’s impact and ways to deal with it; however, they both agree with Marx’s belief in capitalism’s inevitably expansive nature. Capitalism, and the various concepts said to underlie it, are seen as universal these days. The leftright distinction, Anthony Giddens has pointed out, does not exist as it once did. That we must work within the market is acknowledged by all parties: “No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism—the arguments that remain concern how far, and in what ways, capitalism should be governed and regulated” (The Third Way, 1999). So liberals argue that regulation only postpones the inevitable and retards the progress of the developing countries in the process, whereas Marxists want to see a more regulated market, where resources are equitably distributed. Neither questions the necessity of capitalism. Yet underlying the idea of capitalism’s necessity, and thus both views, is the “economic” or “rational” man (as “in our nature”): that there is a scarcity of resources, and that we strive to maximise our own well-being. Thus, alas, we must choose either the market or socialism!

Socialism clearly failed, so we must

Daniel Sjöström work within the market. Yet is this true? Not even close. Such an assertion is clearly, even obviously, false!

The idea of the economic/rational man underlying modern capitalism is nothing but a product of the

“

What is important to note here is how specific all this is to the West, yet how it is generally viewed as universal.

”

Enlightenment concept, crucial to liberal democracy, of the individual qua individual: the “free and equal human being”. Yet both the Enlightenment and this concept were and are a phenomenon peculiar to northern Europe and America. As opposed to this being a distinctive concept crucial to democracy, it is one integral only to liberal democracy. This is the kind of democracy we have in the West; the pluralistic kind that claims that people have rights just because they are human beings.”[A]t this point of social life the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular profession and family position he occupies, nor in relation to the differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen”. Thus wrote Weber a hundred years ago; thus is the West’s ideology.

So you may be asking yourselves at this stage what any of this has to do with globalisation? I say everything!

What is important to note here is how specific all this is to the West, yet how it is generally viewed as universal. A contemporary example may shed some light: Tony Blair wrote about values in Foreign Affairs at the beginning of this year: “For this ideology [“religious”

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extremism], we are the enemy.

But “we” are not the West. “We” are as much Muslim as Christian, Jew, or Hindu. “We” are all those who believe in religious tolerance, in openness to others, in democracy, in liberty, and in human rights administered by secular courts.”

We may surmise that when Tony Blair writes “democracy” he means the western kind of democracy and that with “liberty” he means the liberty of the individual as defined above. As for “human rights”, well, who knows what he means. We presume he refers to the right to believe in anything, but only as long as you do it within the confines of preferably historically Christian, secular pluralism. That those are good values can of course be debated—I personally believe that they are—that they are universally human ones cannot.

We must acknowledge their roots. If globalisation is to ever work, we cannot just say “this or that country needs to democratise and embrace the market”, because most countries will inevitably fail, and misinterpret one or both concepts. Even worse, the West is itself having a hard time keeping the different concepts of free market and democracy apart; much because of how democracy is received and interpreted where it is championed by the West. If there is no culture to which democracy or the market is specific, if they are universal values, how comes their imposition didn’t work in Iraq, in Rwanda, in former Yugoslavia, and so on...? The West only scratches its head.

One way of characterising the different types of democracy I have been concerned with here is to look at how “people” is interpreted in “rule by the people”. This is the path of British sociologist Michael Mann. He suggests that, using the original ancient Greek terms, if “people” is interpreted as demos, we have the citizen/individual model of the West. If however “people” is interpreted as ethnos it becomes synonymous with people of the same ethnicity, or shared cultural background, or religion, or all. Mann notes on the subject of democracy in Iraq: “The US and its allies talk continually of bringing democracy to Iraq, through elections. Yet, by encouraging self-styled leaders of the Kurdish and Shi’a community against those of the Sunni com-

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The Protestant Ethic; industrious and frugal munity, the US is confusing the demos with the ethnos, inexorably developing a majoritarian [sic] organic democracy in Iraq—more precisely, two of them, Kurdish in the North, Shi’a elsewhere.

Elections will be ethnic censuses, as they have long been in Northern Ireland.”

In conclusion then, one cannot champion democracy without understanding its roots, and making sure that the people who are supposed to benefit from this “democracy” know why it has been successful in the West.

Only when this has been done can a people truly decide whether they want it or not. And furthermore, if the market is to work it is important to understand that life in the West is systematically organised around work, where the individual starts “from scratch”, as it were; you choose your life, you have “spare time” and “holidays”. You do not necessarily sell rugs just because your family always has. This requires a great reorganisation of life in most places of the world, just as there once was in Europe and America. If we make this clear we can make the tran-

sition easier for those who desire it; however, if we do not at least explain how wealth is produced in the West, why it has been so successful, and why it is so expansive, globalisation’s lack of success is assured. And, if desired, so too is the failure of liberal democracy!

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he content of this article was put as a question to Amartya Sen at his visit to York. I believe the question I asked, verbatim, was “At the centre of your view of democracy is the individual as being able to choose his or her life. Does this spell problems for societies where life is more traditionally organised and this concept of the individual thus does not exist?”* His answer left me slightly perplexed. The “individual” has always existed in all, or almost all, societies, and it is enormously arrogant of the West to think that they invented it. I then tried to * It will become apparent soon (as the point of this clarification in fact), but it did not occur to me then how imprecise this question was. At the time, Sen asked for an example; I tried to outline Mann’s distinction between demos and ethnos, and its implications.

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 specify my question by asking, Yes, but isn’t it the individual qua individual that is specific to the West? People are “equal” for no other reason than that they are people? The answer was now more intriguing; there is no such thing as “the individual qua individual”; an individual must be viewed in terms of social context. This is the view of the communitarians, dismissed in Sen’s latest book in about three pages. It was not good enough though; I did not feel that my question had been answered, perhaps even understood. That this could be my fault was clear to me of course. If my thought is muddled, where do I go wrong?

For my last try I asked, “how then do you define equality?” I received a text book response along the lines of “persons must be treated equally because not doing so for no particular reason is arbitrary”, or something equally bland.

Perhaps he was tired of me at this stage. For my part, I did not want to take up the whole evening with this question and so the evening went on.

The episode did clear some things up for me however. Firstly, my question, and the example that I gave, were imprecise. I should have mentioned Weber instead of Mann of course, not least because he would have most definitely been familiar to Sen, but also because in an entire book which is largely concerned with sociological questions of identity (Identity and violence) there is not a single mention of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. As Sen’s criticism of the West is in large part that its concept of market capitalism and “individual” democracy is not specific to it, one would have wanted at least a mention of the work tracing the roots of both. It is also the work tracing the roots of and making the distinction between modern capitalism as opposed to capitalism in its other forms; Weber’s starting premise is to ask why it was “that in Florence, the centre of capitalist development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the marketplace for money and capital for all the great political powers, striving for profit was viewed as either morally questionable or at best tolerated? Yet in the business relationships found in small companies in rural Pennsylvania, where scarcely a trace of large-scale commerce could be found, where only the

beginning stages of a banking system were evident, and where the economy was continuously threatened with collapse into sheer barter … the same striving for profit became viewed as legitimate.

Indeed, it became to be understood as the essence of a morally acceptable, even praiseworthy way of organizing and directing life.”

The answer, Weber believed, lay in Calvin’s interpretation of the ascetic Protestants’ obligation to God. I won’t go into the details of the whole book, but the gist (and how it came to secularise itslef) is outlined by the following quotation from John Wesley, the father of methodism (another of the ascetic protestant sects): I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love of the world in all its branches. … So although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this continual decay of pure religion? We

globalisation debate ought not prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich. (my emphasis) Furthermore, Alasdair MacIntyre (in After Virtue), traces the roots of the individual qua individual from the same movement.

Calvin and Calvinism is a big part of this enormous break with the past. In Identity and violence, although many of his contemporaries are mentioned, MacIntyre is not. When you think about something for a long time, a question you fervently want to ask may seem obvious to you, less so to others.

Where Sen wanted to define the “West” as the whole tradition, which as he rightly points out, is the product not only of ancient Rome and Greece but of any part of the world which has come into contact with it at all, my simple point was that perhaps some of the things which we connect with the “West” are specific to it because of a break with that tradition, through Protestant Christianity. Modernity in its two manifestations, the economic and the moral, can trace its roots to this movement. At least, there is good cause to believe so, which is why it would have been all the more interesting to know what Sen makes of that stance. It is a shame I couldn’t get all of this across to him when I had the chance.

Amartya Sen (left) and Lord Bhikhu Parekh at King’s Manor

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Globalisation: Misguided or Mistrusted?

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he word “globalisation” summons a great deal of conflict.

After asking people what the word meant to them, I was left with a large listing of emotive connotations describing unethical and greedy groups of collective power which exploit any means to maximise their own personal interests.

This far from flattering catalogue was combined with fears of possible deterioration of our cultural heritage. I have personally found the so called “advancements in communication technology and the integration of international markets” a bit of a nuisance as my computer's spell checker automatically changes the word globalisation to globalization each time I type it. Nevertheless, is this word simply misunderstood and could this liberalising phenomenon that is making our world smaller be the answer to issues such as world poverty and better futures for all?

Times are changing in Africa, but not for the better. New widespread technologies such as the internet should be spurring globalisation and benefiting everyone. Instead Africa has seen its number of people in poverty double over the last two decades alongside the AIDS epidemic, claiming the lives of around 2 million people each year. Inequality has made the prospect of curing these people in Africa impossible as there is no profit that could be made as they have nothing to give. Today the developed world represents 14% of the world's population and owns 77% of the world’s GDP. So what is going wrong?

Our world is far from the neo-liberal ideological landscape. The USA has artificially made itself into the largest cotton producer in the world through subsidising its own farmers.

Without these subsidies the USA would not be producing cotton!

Europe has just as much blood on its hands. By dumping the surpluses from the Common Agricultural Policy on the world market it becomes non-economically viable for many countries to produce many agricultural goods, even though, they have the comparative advantage. We are simply stunting the

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Nicholas R.W. Fisher growth of the South to in turn protect our own vested interests. With the West forcing the South to open itself up to trade and not fully reciprocating it is not surprising that an advantage lies within our pockets.

Fortunately there are success stories. Those countries that have embraced globalisation through reform and integration and have prevented the ladder being kicked away from underneath them have reaped substantial benefits. The success stories are of course India and China, who have seen their income's grow at astonishingly high rates.

This has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. These countries are now innovative, exciting and culturally stimulating places to be and have proven that the capitalist system does still work. Many journalists have described this as a “miracle”, but regardless of whether it is or not, it is an example of how globalisation can be the answer.

If all markets were completely integrated, in theory unskilled workers would earn the same regardless of where they were in the world. This amount would lie far closer to the wage rates in Africa than that in the UK—which has the benefit of a national minimum wage. As various Western countries are carrying some excess weight and have large pools of low/unskilled workers the prospect of increased foreign competition is far from ideal. However, without this competition the West will never loose these extra pounds and is choosing to abuse its political control to remain comfortable.

Globalisation is a being with awesome power and has caused immense harm and good. When globalisation is well positioned and focused it has appeared to achieve great good and is something to aspire to. Conversely, when the focus is misdirected or thrown off course by political incentives the effects can be catastrophic. The question is will we ever give up our political power and comfort to resolve the troubles that plague our world.

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India and China...are now innovative, exciting and culturally stimulating places to be and have proven that the capitalist system does still work.

” “

Assume that we are on the path to a global village and we may find ourselves walking into a worldwide Panopticon.

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the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Globalisation What is it, and do we want it?

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hat we live in the age of globalisation is announced so often that the news has become almost meaningless. Near endless column inches have been written trumpeting the arrival of our brave new “Global Village”. Writing in Newsweek last year the Prime Minister declared that “complaining about globalisation is as pointless as trying to turn back the tide.”

So what is this Globalisation, so inevitable that it warrants comparison with an intractable natural phenomenon? First we should consider what we are investigating.

When considering the intrinsic disorder and subjectivity of human society, we identify commonalities and connections between particular human practices and relationships in motion, and consider them as specific processes.

Some are fairly standalone, others dialectically connected, feeding back into and dependant on each other. We create abstractions. Some abstractions can be illuminating, revealing the deeper realities of our social existence: how could we begin to understand the complex inequalities of today’s world without a consideration of racism, an abstract way of understanding a myriad of relations and practices? Equally, some terms can have the opposite effect: they can mystify, cloaking the contingent and accidental in an aura of inevitability and objectivity, obscuring human social practice, human choice, as natural, divine or universal. The problem is it precisely suits some people, some social arrangements, that we don’t get to the bottom of things, that we don’t see the human basis of historical processes. Thus choosing which terms to use to describe our world, and how we do so, is a political choice, with political implications for which we should take responsibility.

So, bearing in mind that ‘globalisation’ can only be considered as an abstraction, created by humans to understand their world, we should consider how far is it useful, and for whom?

We can begin by identifying some common strands in many definitions. One common definition of globalisation involves the rapid development of telecommunications technology and infrastructure, and the proliferation of

Raoul Lundberg aeroplane travel which results in what David Harvey calls “time-space compression,” the practical shortening of distances and times. However, another perception focuses on the decline of national states in favour of a liberal, cosmopolitan new order and an intensification of economic competition, particularly involving transnational corporations.

That there is some truth to these observations cannot be doubted. But are they the whole truth, and is it useful to group them together as “globalisation”, and if so for whom? That timespace compression is having a massive impact on social relations in many parts of the world is obvious. But how this development impacts is a social question: new communications technologies could be used to effect a democratisation of life more wide-ranging than ever previously imagined; equally, they open up the possibility of surveillance without parallel. The process must be mediated socially. Assume that we are on the path to a global village and we may find ourselves walking into a worldwide Panopticon.

So, proactive engagement in the social mediation of our new interconnected reality is essential.

‘Globalisation’, invoked as tide-like inevitability, obscures this imperative.

The apparent decline of states and rise of a new transnational order is more disputed. In terms of their coercive and surveillance capabilities the metropolitan states are more powerful than ever before. Today’s US military is the most powerful coercive force to ever exist. What has occurred over the last few decades in many parts of the world is the withdrawal from the performance of certain functions by states—for example generating electricity through nationalised industries. Further, many areas previously subject to state domination have experienced a relaxation of political control. This is not, however, a retreat, or a diminishing, of the state: rather, the state is refraining from intervention. The capacity still exists, and indeed the fact of that capacity is constitutive of the present order: to exist, a

globalisation debate night-watchman state needs a very big stick. For example, property and contract relations must be enforced.

However, there does appear to have been a decline in the power of the state, such as an observable extension of freedoms of movement, speech and democratic representation over the past few years. But observable for who? The new freedoms of expression, of movement especially, are generally restricted to a small minority. The vast majority of the world’s population, on whose surplus labour these intrepid tourists live, don’t get a look-in. They have seen no decline in state control: only its withdrawal from service provision thanks to pressure for privatisation. They could never afford to travel on an aeroplane, or write a weblog.

Nevertheless the extension of freedoms is a positive development, even if that extension remains wildly insufficient. The danger again lies in assuming inevitability; in thinking that we are marching towards a cosmopolitan telos.

This ignores the historical specificity of recent trends. For example, that the end of the Cold War was a probability is debatable; that it played out the way it did was entirely unpredictable. The liberalisation and increased competition we are discussing are the product of a very specific historical conjuncture.

They have been very beneficial for some people. Others have been subject to immiseration, deprivation of essential services and worse. To declare them ‘globalisation, inevitable as the tide’ is to justify all the imperfections, all the bad choices. It absolves those who benefit at the expense of others from responsibility for the losses they cause.

This is true for every forced privatisation, and every worker fired in the name of the ‘pressures’ of a globalised world.

It obscures what is in fact a particular human choice—to choose competitive efficiency over people’s livelihoods; to choose private over public provision— as a natural rather than social process serves an ideological function, supporting the existing order and its beneficiaries.

There is always a choice; we make our own history, albeit not always in circumstances of our own choosing. To invoke globalisation such as to obscure that fact is to both support the existing order and shirk from responsibility for that support. Blair uses globalisation in such a manner; indeed it is how it is generally used. We would be better off without it.

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Tokyo as metaphor “It’s strange. Part of me loves a city like Tokyo, but part of me would quite happily destroy it.”

—Shinya Tsukamoto.

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or the techno-fetishist of the ‘80’s cyberpunk culture, Tokyo is the City. It is vast and incomprehensible, yet depressing and exhilarating too.

It is the future: a mass of concrete, asphalt, and neon signs that expands almost infinitely—a human creation that has attained an inhuman life of its own.

That being said, it is interesting to notice that “Godzillas” and other “ends of the world” have apparently menaced the city throughout its living history. Of all the meanings the super-city embodies, the urge to destroy it is the integral corollary to its allure: a result of all the intellectual machinations—desires, metaphors, elaborations—–attached to the juxtaposition of human flesh and urban context.

Twenty years on, the cyberpunk genre, with its often naïve worship of the machine and its peculiar brand of optimism concerning dystopian future vistas, has been declared “dead” by some, deemed one of those literary/artistic visions that has lost most, if not all, of its spunk. The appeal of Tokyo as a futurist city, though, seems rather unchanged.

Now, to transition from a sketchy and partial literary history to what is in the interest of this article: one cineaste and his two “cyberpunk” films—Shinya Tsukamoto and his Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992).

There is no denying that these films are shamelessly utopian. They are a kind of machine fetishist’s deterministic fantasyland, executed with a hectic cinematography and accompanied by a soundtrack that features the screeching cacophony of metal against metal. This unashamed anarchy in visual and audible form has allowed Tsukamoto to

Elena Tiis address the anxieties of human existence in the megalopolis. The big city’s indifference to the life of an individual makes it quite carnivorous. Better yet, the city’s indifference to individual life conjures up a juicy defensiveness in poor little anxious man.

The menace of Tokyo’s enormity in Tsukamoto’s films is symbolised by the forceful physical transformation of human flesh into metal. Both films deal with organic matter turning into an inorganic “thing”, mirroring the dehumanising surroundings of the megalopolis, its iconic skyscrapers and the endlessly sprawling suburbs. It is a wonderful pathology: in order to attack the city the flesh must first transform itself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; perhaps you’d care for a brief description of what these films are about?

The first Tetsuo film opens with a metals fetishist (Tsukamoto) trying to insert a piece of scrap metal into his thigh. Driven mad by the pain, he runs into the street and is hit by the car of a salary man (Tomoroh Taguchi) out for a ride with his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara).

The couple buries the body in the woods, and, aroused by their action, they copulate, signalling the beginning of a series of disturbing sexual imagery.

Soon after, the salary man contracts a disease that transforms his body into a conglomeration of useless scrap metal parts. His transformations are framed by suburban settings and factory warehouses. The metals fetishist’s peculiar revenge culminates in a nonpareil chase sequence among the winding streets of the city’s edge—culminating in the literal fusion of fetishist and salary man into a mass of metal. The scrap metal spire vows to join with everyone else and transform the earth.

Tetsuo II is not so much a sequel as a restatement of the central issues of the

23—caryl churchill’s recent political theatre

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ALSO IN THIS SECTION

first film. It too examines the effect of mindless mechanisation on human life.

However—to begin a series of basic distinctions—while the first film also deals overtly with sexuality, the second concerns itself with the nature of family affection. The salary man, (again played

by Tomoroh Taguchi) and his family: a wife (Nobu Kanaoka) and son are attacked by a gang of skinheads at the command of their esoteric leader (Tsukamoto). The gang kidnaps the son, inciting a rage in the father that causes his body to mutate into a weapon, or rather, an armoury. The film, like the first one, is largely a pursuit, taking place on top of skyscrapers, on ladders and outside staircases. The filming style is similarly restless, constantly brushing the slick urban surroundings and the peaks of the multi-storey buildings, as if unable to choose a clear focal point.

If you’re looking for convenient conceptual distinctions, the first film represents the claustrophobic experience of the never-ending, winding suburb of the big city, while the sequel deals with the

Still from Tetsuo (1988) central hub dominated by skyscrapers.

In Tetsuo, the action takes place largely on horizontal planes, in Tetsuo II on vertical ones. The second film presents perhaps some of the most iconic of images: in the last scene, the family finds itself looking at the enormous, deserted wreckage of Tokyo with skyscrapers jutting out of the ground like broken teeth.

The carnivorous mouth of the city has been literally punched in the teeth.

Imagining this as a showdown battle, a war between flesh and concrete—the big city versus the organic body—comes to be a rather schizophrenic experience (that pet expression of post-modern theory), but the Tetsuo films actually manage to provide it visually. The human flesh becomes a kind of Golem—an updated version of the Jewish legend of a servant fashioned out of inanimate matter getting out of control. The older legend, specifically in its classic form (publicised in 1847), involves a 16th cen-

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

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The State of Play Caryl Churchill’s Recent Political Theatre Marin Hirschfeld

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tury rabbi, Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, who allegedly creates a Golem to protect a Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. The Golem is an urban phenomenon, linked to the city of Prague in particular. Yet the “Golemic” matter does not yet completely transcend the boundary between organic and inorganic. It can be seen as the ethos of Prague come to life, but not quite to flesh. Tsukamoto’s Tokyo, however, has transcended flesh. In the Tetsuo films, flesh is antiquated: it is a strange, sweating, soft entity that jars with the inorganic surface texture of the city, pithily visualised by the metals fetishist’s unsuccessful attempt to insert a piece of metal into his thigh.

The fetishist fails to integrate with metal of his own accord, but his ensuing flight into the street and collision with the salary man serves as the necessary catalyst for him to hybridise, accompanied by the desire to take his assailant with him. The boundaries between the technological world of the city in the form of a moving metal stump and the organic human body intersect. Kaboom!

Does metal begin to feel desire or affection? According to Tsukamoto, it is rather the flesh that begins to lose these human qualities. In spite of, as well as resulting from, their overt pessimism in their relation to flesh, the films are not without a brand of humour. The first film features a fantastic shot of a power drill replacing the appropriate appendage between the salary man’s legs—leading to a bizarre confrontation with his girlfriend. The metallic form parodies the messy, irrational life of the flesh. At the end of both films, the newly transformed flesh of the metals fetishist/gang leader and the salary man seeks to avenge itself upon the city and the world at large in a very—ahem—ver-

tical fashion, resulting from a contorted integration of two scrap metal men.

Bringing about a conclusion which concerns the terrain covered by the Tetsuo films involves considering that there simply is no Tokyo, because this vast city does not exist on its own right, but in juxtaposition to human flesh and desires. Tokyo could be any big city; it becomes an umbrella term. Parallel to this, the human body is a Don Quixote— an entity that finds its only truths within the fight itself. For the knight it does not actually matter if the giants exist or not, as long as his desire to fight them perpetuates the chivalric fantasy. Similarly, the only exactable truth one can gain from Tokyo is when the city is used as a metaphor: for the future, for the effects of urbanisation, techno-mania and competition amongst human beings at the same level in the food chain. In reference to human flesh, as demonstrated in the Tetsuo films, any megalopolis is Tokyo. The machine form of the fetishist and the salary man seeks to transform the whole world, implying that the urban world inhabited by human beings consists merely of a series of Tokyos— anonymous big city number one, anonymous big city number two…

Herein lies the strength and weakness of the megalopolis concept, when treated by cyberpunk authors or whomever: Tokyo is always trapped within metaphor, merely to prey on human neuroses. The more advanced one of these Tokyos becomes, the more it is to feature the self-referential game of the human flesh. The sheer potential and autonomy of this brainchild of man, the super city, makes him regard it with pride, even as he with desires to restrain, if not destroy it as Shinya Tsukamoto does. In the end, is this just a question of pathology? Yes! Yes! Yes!

he greatest flaw of British postwar drama is arguably its unabating commitment to realism. While on the continent dramatists such as Samuel Beckett, Berthold Brecht, Eugene Ionesco or Jean Genet were breaking the boundaries of drama with radical new forms and theories, Britain was already unsettled by the likes of Osborne. Even as innovations such as the Verfremdungseffekt and Theatre of the Absurd were challenging theatrical conventions, the most revolutionary thing to hit the British stage was kitchen-sink drama.

There have of course been notable exceptions. Beckett—though Irish—is hugely influential and highly acclaimed in Britain. Beckett, though, does not easily fall into the category of realism, so he is simply placed outside the canon and taught as a “modern classic”. Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days are constantly revived; no doubt because they are his most realist plays. But when was the last time you saw a production of Not I or Ohio Impromptu?

Pinter falls into the same category.

His early, more realist pieces are a respected part of British theatrical history, but the shorter, more experimental and extremely political plays are either ignored or misunderstood.

Pinter seemed to lose appeal as “Inyer-face theatre” (yet another “dangerous” and groundbreaking era in British theatre that is at best another rehash of kitchen-sink realism with more swearing and dead babies) arose. He was relegated to the sidelines as Ravenhill and Kane made headlines. At the same time, he became increasingly critical of American foreign policy and New Labour, something the theatre establishment did not want to hear. When Pinter won the Nobel Prize in 2005, it put British theatre in an uncomfortable position. As a result there has been a notable increase of Pinter

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arts revivals across the country. What is being put on? The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and The Caretaker, of course.

It is in this tradition that I would place Caryl Churchill. Most of her early work, such as Cloud 9 and Top Girls, was already challenging many theatrical conventions still prevalent in British theatre in the 1960s and ‘70s. She too is granted the dubious status of “modern classic”: not quite a part of the canon but undeniably influential and therefore even taught in schools. Churchill is generally regarded as a socialist feminist, with the politics of power—especially in regard to women’s equality—a theme in almost all of her plays.

Yet Churchill only becomes really interesting after 1990. Along with more extreme theatrical experimentation, she begins to become more political. With the fall of the “Iron Curtain”, many left-wing intellectuals’ dreams of an alternative to capitalism faded. For Churchill, it marks an important change in her dramatic writing. Her first play post-1990 was Mad Forest, a three-act play focusing on the fall of the communist regime in Romania. While much of the play is naturalistic, Mad Forest also has some completely surreal sequences, unlike most of her early plays. A scene that best exemplifies her use of surrealism is one in which a dog meets a vampire.

VAMPIRE I came here for the revolution, I could smell it a mile off. […]

Nobody knew who was doing the killing, I could come up behind a man in a crowd.

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 DOG Good times.

VAMPIRE There’s been a lot of good times over the years.

What at first seems to be a rather abstract master/slave narrative takes on entirely new meanings when set in the Romanian context: Dracula is the founder of modern Romania and a national hero. The abstract—i.e. nonrealist—symbolism is easily decoded.

The dog represents the Romanian people, looking for a new leader after the old regime has been toppled.

Tragically it chooses a parasitic leader, not so different from its predecessor.

While much of Churchill’s earlier work is indebted to Brecht—both politically and theatrically—I would argue that Mad Forest can be regarded as ‘post-Brechtian’ in its subversion of the scene headings pioneered by Brecht. An opening stage direction instructs: “Each scene is announced by one of the company reading from a phrasebook as if an English tourist, first in Romanian, then in English and again in Romanian”. Some of these headings are straightforward Brechtian summaries of, or introductions to, the scene, while others seemingly have nothing to do with what follows. For example, a scene in which there is a stereotypical eastern European queue for food is entitled, “We are buying meat.” The irony is that no one is in fact buying any meat; it instead becomes a scene of rebellion. In another chilling scene, when the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) are interrogating the father of

Warmth.

It is strange, how the sun seems to shimmer on The grass, as though it were a bed of heaven-sent Butterflies, emerging triumphant from the discarded Chrysalis. Up above, amidst the darting and dashing Thrushes, clouds recede until the sky is a bare naked blue.

Haunting my eyes and elusive in its shine, The sun dances before me; teasing, testing, thrilling, waiting.

Waiting for the moment I close my eyes, and allow my mind to Drift. Blinded by the light of your glow, my world is Luminous, bathed in the warmth you bring.

KATHERINE EBURY

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one of the two families at the centre of the play, the heading is “Two men sitting in the sun.”

It is precisely this irony that defines Churchill’s subversion of Brechtian convention and politics. The point of the headings, as argued by Brecht, is to summarise and explain the scene so that the audience is not distracted by the plot and can be critical of the characters and their actions. However, Churchill also highlights the tension between scene heading and scene.

Thus, when the scene heading has seemingly nothing to do with the actual plot, the audience begins to question the subtext of the scene that follows.

In 1999, Churchill took this concept even further with This Is A Chair.

Consisting of eight stand-alone scenes, each again with a heading that seems to have no connection with what actually follows. This is an entire scene: Pornography and Censorship FATHER, MOTHER and MURIEL at dinner.

FATHER Is Muriel going to eat her dinner?

MOTHER Yes, eat up, Muriel.

FATHER Have a special bite of daddy’s.

MOTHER Yes, eat up, Muriel.

FATHER Muriel, if you don’t eat your dinner you know what’s going to happen to you.

MOTHER Yes, eat up, Muriel.

The heading seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the scene, but the juxtaposition of the scene and heading raises certain questions: who is being censored? The girl or the mother? Is “pornography” alluding to the father’s threat in some way? What makes it even more confusing is that the same exact scene is later replayed, but under the heading “The Northern Ireland Peace Process.”

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 It is only when the scenes are reexamined in relation to the headings that the political connotations become apparent. Churchill is using what I call a post-Brechtian technique to present the macro political in the micro political. However, unlike Brecht who was following a clear socialist agenda and wanted to make audiences politically aware, Churchill simply shows that politics are a part of everyday life.

What those politics may be is left open for interpretation. Thus it is precisely Churchill’s non-realist—postBrechtian if you like—theatricality that conveys political awareness. Her plays go further than Brecht’s, both theatrically and politically.

Churchill also increasingly began to experiment with language after 1990.

The Skriker (1994) is a surreal look at English myths. The fairies’ underworld and our world are inextricably linked - the environmental damage humans have done is destroying their world too. Motivated by revenge and a lust for human blood, the Skriker, a shape shifter, lures first Josie then Lily to the underworld. Just as the Skriker is described as “ancient and damaged”, so too is its language; a Joycean word association stream of consciousness that even the Skriker seems unable to control.

SKRIKER Wars whores hips hip hoorays it to the ground glass. Drought rout out and about turn off. Sunburn sunbeam in your eye socket to him. All good many come to the aids party. When I go uppity, follow a fellow on a dark road dank ride and jump thrump out and eat him how does he taste? toxic waste paper basket case, salmonelephantiasis, blue blood bad blood blad blood blah blah blah.

Here too, Churchill uses theatrical innovation, creating a unique language to convey politics. In its surrealism, The Skriker is at once a critique of environmental, family, mental health and feminist politics. Blue Heart (1997) continues her linguistic experimentation. Comprising two short plays, Heart’s Desire and Blue Kettle, it deals with family politics and identity. In Heart’s Desire, a short scene in which two parents wait for the return of their daughter is replayed over and over again, with

arts

slightly alternative endings. At the end of each version, the scene is reset. In Blue Kettle a con man tricks old women into believing he’s their son.

Over the course of the play the words “blue” and “kettle” are substituted for other words, then reduced, until all that is left is an explosion of plosives: MRS PLANT K k no relation. K name k John k k? K k k dead k k k believe a word. K k Derek.

DEREK K, t see blue.

MRS PLANT T b k k k k l?

In 2006, Churchill returned from family to global politics with Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, a play about the stages of a couple’s relationship in the language of British and American foreign policy: JACK explosion at the embassy SAM fuck, fuck do something JACK stop shouting at me because SAM on my side?

In Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Churchill uses formal experimentation as a dramatisation of political discourse more overtly than in any of her previous plays. However, I believe that Churchill— more than any other active playwright of her generation—breaks free from the prevalent and restrictive mode of realist playwriting. Unfortunately, the plays that are revived most frequently are her early plays; precisely the plays that I would argue are far less experimental and provocative. Unlike many other writers, Churchill constantly challenges the theatrical status quo with her innovations. Rather than shocking for the sake of shocking, Churchill challenges the audience’s preconceptions and complicity. In doing so, she not only pushes the boundaries of theatre further, but also takes political discourse into the theatrical space, which—at least in Britain—has become so rare.

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commentary

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007

Non Serviam?

W

riting words on the way other words were written covers a broad range of academic activity, from semantics and linguistics to literary theory and the classics; this does not mean to say that doing so, (writing on writing) ever can be anything other than the apogee of hermeneutic schizophrenia. Take immortality, a notion on which much has been written. We have accepted that, ultimately, our political, theological, philosophical and even scientific strife has been on account of our effort to attain physical immortality. And yet any relevant rhetoric is currently in denial; all disciplines unanimously declare that “we will always be mortal”, and then indulge in all the aforementioned research activity aiming at the contrary. Alternative ways of negotiating immortality do exist of course, albeit only in the realms of megalomaniac medical paranoia and mental disorder.

What little is discussed of the antinomy which characterises our most basic identity predicament is usually shadowed by the—often unidentifiable—proceedings of academic identity theory; the fields of social and gender studies, cultural studies and even political studies stand their ground rigidly: scholarly permission is required before any unauthorised quarters discuss identity. This is traditionally know—by the very carriers of it too—as the fascist identity.

Perhaps it will be important to discover the reasons why the pursuit of immortality through logical discourse has become so neglected and “Wagnerian” a pastime. Even more so when sexual orientation, pop culture, sports culture and animal rights, as well as other similarly secondary, sub-identity issues, are discussed at length. The reconstructionalist and the structuralist philologist will point at the value of analysis; the true thinker will not believe a word they say and not apologise for the suspicious response. There are specific reasons why secondary and false identities are emphasised by the culture industry.

The academic and political com-

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Panos Demopoulos munities happily defend any activity which allows the selective circulation of wealth—could we not, after centuries of self-congratulating and selfanalysis, detect a glimmer of hope that we may cease to promote the idea of a world in which we consume and in which all non-euroleptic creatures breathe for our edification and entertainment only? Whether we should or not is a matter of a moral imperative, which is irrelevant; but in fact, no, after centuries of systematic exploitation of the weaker people by the mightier people, we could not but continue to enjoy abusing the weaker people a little more. Again, this is not to say we shouldn’t; moral judge-

ments and personal opinion will not be expressed here, but an observation is to be made: we cannot wish to depart from the colonialist era, the question of choice between “evil and good” is solved automatically when accepting to participate in Western life. Poor people from other continents are our servants, and we shall not wish to do anything to change that.

Is this some form of evangelical sermon on the wrongs of sadism? If it reads as such, it may be the writer’s spiteful psyche, or it may be the reader’s super-cynical eyes; alas—it may also be both. In any case, the truth and identity of the matter remain indifferent to our interpretations; the social order of things is plainly this: they produce, we consume. Every day or so, every one of us buys at least

one thing and in the meantime every one of them makes at least one thing for us to use. This hierarchy is our cultural birthright and an immutable fact. Efforts are made to conceal the severe social injustice that this reality and much cherished order entails: the balance and order of things is attached the identity of world economy. This is the practical identity of the world, immovable and yet fragile; its fragility encompassing all the nightmares we might care to predict.

No such care permeates this essay.

To our social credit, occasionally we consume pity by offering some limited, publicly registered and halfmeant help. Then we enter the identity of the Christiano-Democratic European mind. Guilt, an emotion often despised by the progressive consumer, for it hinders the maximisation of shopping hours, is the proto-indulgence of the children of misericordia, the traditional consumers. No concession will be made here for the lesser social forgery that all such affiliated constituent psychologies represent.

Of course, the more nefarious layers of our consumerist pyramid may even ignore the mechanics of this unjust world altogether and never realise that the excesses of the pleasure they desire usually translates into the misery of many others in economical terms. The archetype modern-day, sofa-bound Scaramuc-cia usually dismisses such annoying thoughts by deeming them as moralist solecism; this is the first step towards continuing on the road to mental obesity. Examples of such creatures are abundant in the capitalist bestiary of the 21st century and have now supplanted the more Christiano-Democratic prototypes as leaders of social role modelling—the portrayal of social perfection by the mass media has little to do with the glorification of offering a helping hand and when it does, the mien of the affair discussed is so obviously manufactured that it transcends charity and transforms it into unadulterated publicity.

This new class of people who have deleted the few remaining stains of egalitarian justice from the marbles

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 of social interaction represents a new species; homo juvenis, (the youthhuman). The archetype character of the class remains juvenile, (but never young,) by conducting the fight against mortality through a constant quest for gratification. Far from being neo-hedonists, youth-humans have no interest in Dionysian decadence, but live faithfully by the ISBN code of honour. Happiness comes at 9.99 of some monetary currency for a few moments, at 99.99 for a day or so and at 999.999.999 for a good part of life, say 9,999 days, (the newly established 99-hour days that is). Homo esculens, (the edible-human) subsists on the other side of the planet, somewhere in the third world; sometimes he gets angry and kills indiscriminately only to be subdued dramatically for the purposes of prime time entertainment, other times he continues to serve the Western upper-classes and dreams of the day when this obsessive decimal arith-

“

When a composer suggests that she is a female composer as opposed to a male one for instance, what does she mean?

Are the notes pink?

”

metic may come closer to his reality as an invincible aid to social vindication.

Both species are likely mistaken in judging that the attainment of immortality is expected through the avenues of shopping. The lack of zeros in contemporary culture is, by the stage which we have reached, complete and irreversible. Any deeper reflection on non-identities is absent, if quite lamentably so: the presence of a non-identity ever qualified the true value of identity via scepticism. On the contrary, what has no price tag or classification number today is not merely a non-identity or a non-being, but a non-entity.

Experience is now the whim of the industrial monopolies of identity leading to a conceptual vacuum of totalitarian proportions. Unsur-pris-

ingly, public voices of dissent are dealt with: they are assigned the identity of the grotesque, the raging dissident, or of madness, meaning that the public domain belongs to the industry of culture alone.

More specifically onto the creative arts and in music, it is no secret that the quantification of sound and its commodification are now globally absolute. Identification and terminology are the proto-tools with which sounds are disseminated and experienced; cataloguing is therefore essential. These procedures are well documented and harmless, for they express the ancient entrepreneurial spirit of creativity and they are a piece of contemporary folklore like any other.

But what of the creative agent who self-catalogues? When a composer suggests that she is a female composer as opposed to a male one for instance, what does she mean? Are the notes pink? Do the stems grow breasts or are the silences periodic according to some gynaecologically derived temporal scheme? Does the sound give birth to mini sounds? Is the writer of this text a misogynist for not caring at all about the term ‘female music’? Why does a composer speak of irrelevancies in order to set up a fictional identity for the music? What happened to the composer’s self and its manifestation in music? Is this composer so untalented, so far away from writing anything interesting that an allusion to the identity of the vagina is the best idea she can put forth for the listener to contemplate upon?

This phenomenon must be quite new. The creative musician is traditionally a mystic. In the words of Susan Sontag “Just as the mystic has to end with a via negativa, a theology entailing God’s absence…so must Art tend towards anti-Art...[Art being] a medium towards an end which can only be achieved by abandoning Art…”. Of course, the mythologies of Art are recent and do not hold any axiomatic truth. But the positivist, common sense, practical mind worships idiomatic terminology so categorically than any sense of poetry is lost in the autocratic schemes of financial causality and identity plagiarism.

Oddly enough, perceiving culture as an abstraction or at least wishing to remain outside the domain of

commentary property transaction is known as the post-Marxist identity. Even the Teletubby world allows for more colours than human opinion, it seems, and one is not allowed to disagree with the proposition of consumerism or one will be immediately called discredited names in punishment. To add to this needless paragraph and to qualify it, always with apologies to the intelligent reader, here follows a clear confession: this is not a post-Marxist text.

Equivalence in culture is political hubris. Sound does not mean anything. It cannot mean anything other than the sound it was; the past tense of the matter is operative here; i.e. reproduction of sound is not the recorded sound itself. Again, the culture industry promotes the conviction that the logic in the above statement is flawed and that somehow sound is to be captured with microphones and other emblematic apparatus and classified for shipping and purchase. It is no great crime to promote such an absurdity if it makes the lives of people ‘better’ than they were. And to an extent it does, but there is a point reached with artifice when the self, the true identity of human beings, is negated the full experiences of life.

More generally, in all things cultural, false identity gradually obfuscates the essence of experience and the experience of the self. If an eccentric artist throws paint all over a wall in a Manhattan apartment we call that contemporary art and celebrate it at dinner parties. The same act performed by a young boy in Tang Hall is condemned as an act of vandalism, not to mention that in other parts of the world the act would probably result in the actor’s amputation.

The above distinction refers to modes of perception. The painter unleashes part of “his angered identity” on “his own wall” which he “graces with creativity”. The boy unleashes “anger” on “someone else’s wall” which he “destroys”.

Translating this: the former generates wealth because of the inherent energies in the reception of such work in certain sociopolitical conditions; the latter generates negativity because such deeds only result in impoverishment. Financial criteria emerge as the sole arbiters of the act’s artistic value.

Naturally, in art the intention is

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commentary important and it informs and shapes the act itself, but surely, even the above example, however tedious, shows that no artistic act is autonomously perceived and that according to the culture industry, the intention of the artist must be extraneous to the art-form before art is made. The force of associative imagery in contemporary culture demands our attention rather than our participation: sounds are not to do with hearing, painting not to do with vision. Instead, it is style, the informant of capitalism, which directs our experience. The self, trapped in style, ‘shakes its brass nightgown’ and continues to accept the finite time it is granted by the Gods of contemporary identity—consequently immortality as an unending physical existence, is only perceived throught the prism of decay.

At this point it may be useful to illustrate the criticism of this essay with an improvised fable: A little man was walking down a street when he saw something in the distance. Immediately he assumed that when you see something from far away, it must be a bar of chocolate or a very attractive female, so he ran towards the spot only to find a very large man with a club waiting for him. The large man said: ‘I do not like men who are smaller than me.’ The little man

the zahir | vol. 2 issue 2 | monday 25th june, 2007 then tried to run away from the larger man but wasn’t fast enough, so he was killed after some 49.99 minutes of one-sided violence.’

Epimythion (pessimistic version) When you see something from afar it is not always something you would like to see—it may be something you would rather not see Epimythion (optimistic version) When you see something from afar it is always something you would like to see if you end up dead because of seeing it, it is because you wanted to be dead In Prometheus we find the first true hero of European mankind. It may or may not be important that the first definition of heroism is to do with the defiance of divine order, but it is so nonetheless. Stealing fire and the right to light from the Gods translates, in contemporary terms, into stealing back our identity and the right to selfdom in contemporary terms. Heroism is out of fashion and perhaps not accidentally so—the Gods have grown wiser and they do control marketing and advertising campaigns exclusively. If the 300 of

Prometheus, the first thief of spiritual copyright.

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Thermopylae become a blockbuster film and their identity is marred, and if the throne of the anonymous hero is usurped by the greedy impostor through the centuries, there is still ample historical precedent to show that history itself is only an identity of sorts, an impostor of experience.

Ultimately the question becomes clearer, upon reflecting on the small things and the immediate perspectives. This text is identifiable through its symbols, its many meanings and philological conventions. They, the identities which constrain its experience, are the Gods who command it.

Outside their divine wish, the text is unidentifiable and therefore no longer a text as such. Were an infant’s virgin eyes to meet these lines, they might be saved the trouble of confusion and choose to focus on the pleasant geometry of printed symbols instead. Ceci n’est pas une pipe: the heart and privilege of the baby world as opposed to the blue and pink vision we have of it.

To conclude, let us place our experience irrespectively of the unexplored depths of ontology concerning identity and ask a simple set of questions: Who wants to believe in Gods that curse their people dead and dying? What God is it who cannot promise us infinity? Who cares for such idolatry, and why? Do we not recognise the fathers of our culture anymore? Rilke wanted to rediscover the Gods himself through naming things from the beginning, dismissing fabricated identities. In the Art of fugue, Bach created the most splendid and unidentifiable abstraction in the documented history of music, and Shakespeare wrote that “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie”. The self, then, rather thannot the plastic attributes of lifestyle identity, is where true cultural experience ensues. Not many of us can be heroes ourselves, but we can use the Promethean fires well, even from the confines of a capitalist routine. As for Prometheus, the first thief of spiritual copyright, his fate is known: for immortality, for the sake of immortality and ad infinitum, tortured and wronged, chained on a rock by unjust Gods, he is awaiting Hercules, the visceral hero of humanity to rescue him. In the meantime, he is looking at the wild, dramatic skies of pre-history and whispers a biblically inspired Non Serviam.