One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and affects caught up in them. My current research focuses on who is really responsible for the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. My money is on the BNP and Ken Livingstone, hand-in-glove; doubtless one of the housemates was their cat’s-paw (Jo O’Meara, perhaps? Or Ian “H” Watkins, his lovable camp persona just a front). Read more↴
Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on Celebrity Big Brother.- The This Life special nostalgically reviving lazy mid-90s reflexive “irony” (Egg has written a book! Little does he know he is just a character himself!).
- The current state of British dance music, as filtered through ads for compilations. A surprisingly high concentration of Happy Hardcore (is this just a north of England thing?), and a remix of “Another Brick in the Wall.” Genius.
I’m not so keen on the fact that ITV and the producers of Dead Clever seem to think it’s OK to structure your plot around classic 1950s cliche, “Lesbian, driven mad by her disordered, unnatural lusts, turns to murder.”
Talking to a friend a while ago, he expressed surprise when I said that I found, in sad music, not tears and catharsis, but an odd sort of strength, or even cheer. “But listen to Miles Davis playing Concierto de Aranjuez,” he said; “how can you not feel the bleakness, the absolute despair in that record?” But what stops it short of being absolute despair is precisely the fact that it is a record. It’s not simply the bleak fact of despair, but a representation of despair; hence proof that something can be done with sadness. This kind of sublimation is not a theodicy, at least not in the traditional sense. The brute fact of suffering is not justified by the brute fact of redemption, rather, redemption, or the closest we can get to it, comes through the fact that suffering can be interpreted, that the fact that we suffer never determines what we then do with that suffering.
I was reminded of this by two things this week. Read more↴
Unlike Adam, I’ve been quite enjoying the police investigation sub-plot on House; but I’m worried that at this point they’ve given themselves nowhere to go. After last week’s episode, it seems inevitable that House will have to “learn” something from the experience, and thereby doubtless “grow” as a “person.”
If there’s one thing I don’t want from House, it’s learning and growth, which completely misunderstands what is so compelling about House as a character. House of course is very unhappy, but it would be quite wrong to take the pop-Platonist-therapy route of saying that this is because of ignorance on his part. On the contrary, House knows exactly why he is unhappy, and continues to do it anyway, precisely because if he ceased to do that, he would no longer be him. There is no “real” house separate from his depression and pain. I’m reminded of Deleuze’s gloss of Nietzsche: “The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.” It’s hard to think of a more consistent, a more terrible, or a more cheering, self-knowledge.
In other House news, it appears (from the faith-healer episode repeated last night) that Dr Cameron is a Spinozist. How splendid.