The End of the Humanities University? Composing, 08/03/2016

I was originally going to write something about Antonio Negri’s take on how the concepts of sovereignty and state-centric war changed in our era of globalization, and in the context of the W years. Multitude came out in 2004, when the madness of George W was at its height. It couldn’t be avoided.

Whatever issues you may have with the mistakes and
problems that have come up in the wave of student protest
this year, like this example from Yale, that students are
so universally driven to direct protest action is a sign of
a deeper rot in the system.

But I decided to lay off that for now. Maybe tomorrow.

Because I wanted to develop my ideas for my panel at the Canadian Philosophical Association this May about Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I only ended up doing that for a little bit at the end of yesterday’s posts. Sometimes, I’ll write just a prologue.

And save the details for now. Or at least the riffs that, once the final presentations and panel talks are prepared, will become the details. That’s one thing I’ve always used the blog for – preparing my ideas in a free-floating form before their presentation structure is hammered down.

So the discipline of academic philosophy – the professional field of study in the modern university system – faces a serious crossroads today. University management in the West has pretty universally embraced new liberal values. That makes the university very ill-suited today to what philosophy has tried to be over the last couple of centuries.

Philosophy has tried to be two things. One is the leisurely study of a particular canon of intellectual writings, which slowly adds to that canon. This is what Richard Rorty meant when he said (and I paraphrase) that he was paid to sit around pleasant lecture halls and eateries all day at Princeton, read wonderful books, and write about them.

That was never really the case except for the most prestigious academic philosophers – the ones whose professional reputations allowed them to kick back their way through seminars. But it’s still the governing ideal of the profession in its practice.

Bertrand Russell agitated for progressive political causes
all his life, from his years in prison for standing against
the First World War to the last years of his life that he
spent agitating against nuclear weaponry and the
invasion of Vietnam.

Second, philosophy has aimed to be an academic discipline in the humanities. Since its institution in the modern university system in the 1800s, philosophy and the rest of the humanities developed along the same model of the sciences.

I’m being incredibly simplistic here – I’ll remind you that I’ve already identified this as a riff.

But what’s common to these approaches is the separation of the order of philosophers from the masses of humanity. Let’s be absolutely honest when I say that the ideal of the philosophical vocation that Rorty described isn’t work. 

While organizing philosophy in parallel to an empirical science is certainly work, the society still becomes a realm of specialized professionals. An elite with more special and rarefied cognitive powers than the rest of us.

No wonder humanities PhDs have a popular reputation as self-absorbed blowhards. 

The new liberal governance models that run the university system today, though? It’s made professors of all disciplines into working stiffs. Just look at the sad fate of most adjunct teachers today. And even more income-secure professors are often under terrifying pressure from governments that make their education institutions into corporate servants. 

Yet the ethical ideal of philosophy revolves around fighting public ignorance, bringing sanity and reason to the wider world. That’s how philosophy is pitched to undergrads, but it’s forgotten once the ivory tower closes around the professors.

Antonio Negri spent more than a decade in prison on
fraudulent charges from the Italian government that he
was a secret leader of the Brigate Rosse. Where are
philosophy's most notable names today? Fleeing to
Mexico or retiring in disgrace after sexual harassment
and exploitation of students.

And that ivory tower prevents professors from understanding themselves as working stiffs. Jumping from contract to contract and curb-stomping colleagues just for a shot at a permanent position? That’s the mercenary, solidarity-breaking attitude that oligarchical types encourage to stop union movements. 

With the discipline’s institutions turning against its practitioners, I’d say that it’s time to ditch the institution – if not attack it from the inside and agitate to end these unjust demands on practice.

This is what I mean about maintaining philosophy as a tradition beyond academic walls. Writing works whose purpose is to agitate and educate, instead of carrying on arcane arguments in technical language. The institutions have betrayed the ideals of the philosophical tradition. 

An act of betrayal breaks the trust anyone would require to live together, wouldn’t it?

Ethics: It’s About Changing Your Soul, Composing, 07/03/2016

I felt like Friday’s post didn’t really get into the meat of how much this anti-racism argument actually hits to the core of the ethical ideas I’ve developed in my non-fiction writing. 

It stuck pretty solidly with the framework of Antonio Negri’s stories about Pasolini’s and Moravia’s trips to India. But it never got beyond the level of talking about that story. I wanted it to, but frankly, I was pretty tired when I was writing that one. 

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity deals with this at the end of its narrative. After wandering through the different inadequate attempts from academic philosophy to figure out what environmentalist morality should be or is,* it ends up concluding that this isn’t quite the right question to ask.

One thing, of many, that I wanted to do with Ecology,
Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is make clear that
environmentalism wasn't necessarily about the
rejection of technology or urbanity per se.

* This is a problem with philosophy as a wider tradition – the unfortunately common belief that the discipline is after universal truths that you discover through reflection and argument alone. In other words, the truths of environmentalist morality, if we truly discover them, have always been true. Where I think those truths came to be once humanity became capable of serious and seriously fast ecological destruction.

The individual principles or moral imperatives about living in a more ecologically sustainable way don’t actually matter. What counts is that we transform ourselves to think and act more ecologically than egotistically. Change ourselves ethically, and the moralities will follow.

There will be lots of environmentalist moralities. There already are, actually. And if everyone becomes an environmentalist, there will be many more than there are now. When environmentalism is the top priority of our moral thinking, we’ll all discover different routes to live that ideal.

It’s the same when we deal with racism. I mean, the two problems – ecological destruction and the ideologies of racism – are incredibly different in their content. But I’m talking at a super-abstract level here about the potential in humanity for radical ethical transformation.

At that context, the process is basically the same – transformation of who we are and how we think in our instinctual, habitual aspects. In our most everyday, innocuous moments, we’re totally different people than we used to be. This process of transforming yourself is the essence of political change. 

That’s how I end Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I’ll explore that whole process explicitly, from start to some kind of finish, in Utopias. 

These two books of philosophy – one written and published, the other still inchoate and largely immaterial – are at the centre of more than just my own writing and publishing projects. Their ideas inform my work in politics. 

I remember reading Knut Hamsun as a novelist who
could give me some ideas about how to approach
environmentalist living. But his writing and ideas are
sadly more that of a broken romantic (and Romantic),
as well as being disturbingly sexist in his literary
themes and racist in his everyday life. Pan was a
beautifully written novel, though.

Right now, that’s the Syria Film Festival and its promotion of rights for refugees and war migrants, and my involvement with the New Democratic Party, trying to inject the energy of contemporary social movements back into the organization. 

Art about people who are frequently demonized in more socially conservative conversations help puncture stereotypes and delusions about migrants and refugees. Thinking along with Negri, it helps people see folks they considered utterly alien to themselves as actually having much in common – a desire for peace, prosperity, and democracy. 

Canada’s modern social movements – particularly Idle No More, our chapters of Black Lives Matter, and Basic Income – are about radically reorienting how each of us understands ourselves. Our whole identity transforms. 

And I’m taking this concept to the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings this May in Calgary. There, I’m presenting a morning-long panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I’ll not only discuss its philosophical themes and methods, but also the implications for philosophy as a profession, discipline, and tradition.

I’ve been going through a lot of financial difficulties lately as I try to get my new career as a business communicator and a writer off the ground. It made me think I should cancel my panel, until friends and former colleagues from my academy days impressed on me what an accomplishment it is to land a panel of this size at the CPA when you don’t even have a university position at all. 

The short version, because this post is already running longer than I’d planned. If philosophy is to regain its public relevance, it has to leave its academic rabbit-holes behind – stop the norms of argument and increasingly technical debate.

Philosophy as a tradition has to be about bringing the most profound cognitive powers of humanity to political activism – about seeing the depth and breadth of change that humanity can bring to ourselves. 

And then do it!

This Mad British Monster V: Doctor Who? Jamming, 06/03/2016

That line is such a joke running throughout the entire history of the show. Someone asks who that mysterious man* was, hears the answer “The Doctor!” then responds, “Well, yeah, but Doctor who?” Rose Tyler said it in Rose back in 2005, because 42 years in, you can lampshade that joke.

The TV Movie committed many of the worst mistakes
of regenerations stories. One of them was never giving
your new Doctor a chance to play the character as s/he
wants to. Doubly a mistake when the regeneration story
is a pilot for a relaunch in a country were Doctor Who
was little more than a cult at the time.

* Or perhaps soon, mysterious woman.

But as we’ve said in the new series, it’s more than just a question, isn’t it? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was literally an essential question and problem at the heart of Doctor Who. The vision of what Doctor Who should be was increasingly a matter of division and conflict, pulling the official continuation of the show apart from the newly legitimate fan-made media.

In 1997, the licence for Virgin Publishing to release Doctor Who books expired, and the absolutely awful TV Movie starring Paul McGann prompted the BBC to take the publication of the series into their own hands. 

Actually, let’s talk about that movie for a second. Just a second. It doesn’t deserve much more. I said last week that the legacy of the Virgin Publishing years was preserving the inventive spirit of Andrew Cartmel’s tenure as Doctor Who’s script editor while Sylvester McCoy played him on TV. 

Those Doctor Who novels, especially under Rebecca Levene’s editorship, were creative, inventive, and playful in a similar way as the televised McCoy stories. The TV Movie wasn’t any of that at all. Its plot was threadbare and it required a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge of Doctor Who to understand any of the characters’ motives. 

And this was supposed to sell Doctor Who to mainstream America – a society that had largely never heard of the show except as an odd curiosity on PBS. On top of the story’s heavy dependence on dreaded continuity, so much of the movie focussed on setting up McCoy’s regeneration and Paul McGann’s amnesia that he barely even got to play his take on the Doctor. The Doctor Who TV Movie didn’t even really have a Doctor.

After the flop of the TV Movie, the writers at BBC Books
were left with a Doctor Who had even less personality
than these terrible publicity photos. That's not even Paul
McGann's real hair – he's wearing a wig!

So it tanked. It tanked and BBC Books was stuck with a line focussed on a Doctor that didn’t even have a personality of his own. The editors developed a persona that was based, essentially, on the one single moment in the story where the Doctor’s dialogue wasn’t filled with technobabble or pure plot advancement.

The Doctor looks down at his shoes, part of a costume he stole from the hospital changing room where he woke up, and exclaims to his de facto companion Grace, “These shoes! They fit perfectly!”

So the first era of the Eighth Doctor** novels began with this very broad outline of the character as this manic, madcap, zany adventurer. Accordingly the line drifted around for quite a bit, until a single creative voice among the novelists became prominent.

** Why do I call him the Eighth Doctor when I’ve said before that I’m switching to naming the Doctors after their actor? Because the BBC Books Eighth Doctor departs so radically from what Paul McGann himself actually wanted to do with the character. You’ll see why.

Lawrence Miles, with his debut novel Alien Bodies, in my opinion the best of his books in the whole range, created basically all the ideas that would go on to provide the aesthetic and narrative elements of the entire BBC Books era of the Eighth Doctor.

He developed Faction Paradox, the cult of Gallifreyans who sought to upend the order of the universe through the anarchic destabilization of history. The notion of the War, a cataclysm where a terrible conflict with an unnameable enemy would destroy the Time Lords. Where have I heard of that before?

The BBC Books line placed their irrepressibly bubbly
Doctor in horrifyingly violent situations, even though
it rendered the character a mute block of depression.
Just because no one had any better ideas.  Wait,
though. Something's different here.

Faction Paradox and the War were Miles’ main story ideas, and he continues to develop Faction Paradox fiction and comics today. But they dominated the BBC Books line, basically, because he was the only writer there who had any ambition to do genuinely new creative things with Doctor Who.

Miles’ concepts were thoroughly pessimistic, however. Faction Paradox’s imagery was pulled from Lovecraftian terror and voodoo ritual. And the influence of Alien Bodies on the rest of the BBC Books range was evident in the darkness of its storyline.

The Doctor confronted the literal event of his own death – the alien body at the centre of the novel’s conflict was his own. Miles’ epic two-part novel Interference saw the Doctor’s timeline made paradoxical: time travel shenanigans involving the Eighth Doctor and Faction Paradox saw Jon Pertwee’s Doctor killed by gunshot at the culmination of a storyline that relentlessly mocked his era’s campy spirit. 

The plot point was a cheeky play at the sanctity of continuity that anal retentive nerds maintained in sci-fi culture of the 1990s and well before. But it was also horribly disturbing to the joyous spirit of Doctor Who that McGann’s original performance captured. 

Miles’ central narrative structure was about putting this maniacally happy Doctor through hell. And most of the other authors in the range followed his lead. No one else among the writers was offering any ideas worth leading. 

The rest of the BBC Books line continued in similar depressing territory. Miles left the line on bad terms (as tends to be the theme of his career) when The Ancestor Cell destroyed the Time Lords and all of his continuity in a horrifying apocalypse. 

Not only did Paul McGann finally play the Doctor as he'd
always wanted in Big Finish, they introduced a new look
for the character a few years ago that got rid of the
stupid Lord Byron wig he'd always disliked.

After that, the second half of the BBC Books era, despite the more optimistic and creative books of Lloyd Rose and the madcap mysteries of line editor Justin Richards, continued to plumb this dank narrative territory, as an amnesiac Doctor travelled the universe in dystopia after dystopia. 

Meanwhile, a group of fans became good enough at making audio plays that they successfully petitioned the BBC for a licence to make actual new Doctor Who stories. And they hired all the living classic series Doctors. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy, along with most of their companion actors, joined the party.

And it really was a party. As with any fan-based medium, Big Finish’s audios held close to the aesthetic of the classic series. They even had episodic cliffhangers, even though you held the entire story on a CD in your hands. But they recaptured the spirit of their televised eras, and in McCoy’s case, even the darker territory of the Virgin years of novels. 

They even had Benny Summerfield audio plays, and audio plays featuring McCoy’s Doctor, Ace, and Benny!

It was an ultimate coup when they actually landed Paul McGann – against the protests of his agent Janet Fielding. And he got to play his Doctor as he originally wanted. Less of the manic insanity of the “Shoes!” scene and the BBC Books portrayal.

Pictured: How we all like to imagine Big Finish Doctor
Who audios are filmed.

Paul McGann’s Doctor retains the sense of happiness in travelling that he displayed in the TV Movie. And he pushes that forward into the deep bonds of loving friendship he forms with his companions. But he’s also sarcastic, sardonic, ironic, kind of a bitch sometimes, and a little bit of a subdued flamer.

That sharper edge to the character means that McGann’s Doctor is really the stronger character. When the BBC Books line grew solidly and irrepressibly dark – as with novels like the very ironically named Hope – the Eighth Doctor was positively depressed at the horror and hopelessness of the universe. McGann’s Doctor had a fight to him that the novels’ Eighth Doctor had lost. 

Unless Justin Richards was writing, in which case we basically got McGann’s Doctor in a novel, as in The Gallifrey Chronicles. 

I'm not about to say Big Finish was perfect. They’ve produced quite a few stinkers in their time – weighed down by fanwank, generic storylines, mistaking violence or excessive pessimism for actual drama. It happens in any multi-author medium that not everything is as brilliant as the best.

But the best is so brilliant! Paul Magrs’ The Stones of Venice was enchanting, and anything he’s written featuring Iris Wildthyme – whether in novel or audio where Katy Manning plays her – is positively lovely.

Katy Manning's performance as renegade Time Lord
Iris Wildthyme was the first major break Big Finish
made with the continuity-obsessed aspect of sci-fi fan
culture: a companion actress playing a new
character. And one that so embodies the camp style
of her original era, while allowing her and her writers,
especially creator Paul Magrs, to do more with that
aesthetic than had ever been possible at the time, or
through the excessive fealty of heritage fanservice.

Rob Shearman’s claustrophobic chamber pieces, especially Jubilee and Chimes of Midnight, are brilliant uses of audio as a medium, and some of the best early performances of Colin Baker and Paul McGann in the Big Finish years. Those are only just my favourite two examples, as the line has continued to innovate while it’s begun running concurrently with the revived television series.

And finally getting Tom Baker is a crown jewel on a beautiful legacy. It was capped only by getting Lalla Ward to do audio plays with him again – I think the Big Finish studios might be the first place they’ve appeared together in real life since the divorce.

You know, as much as a case can be made for the influence of Lawrence Miles on some of the ideas Steven Moffat brought to the new series, I think Big Finish has probably had the more lasting impact. 

Because they were the ones who showed, during those bleak wilderness years, that Doctor Who was about the joy, optimism, and wonder of unrestrained storytelling through all of space and time. That's what Doctor Who really is.

The Diversity of Life Is Difference in Ourselves, Research Time, 04/03/2016

There's a passage in Multitude where Antonio Negri tells the story of two other Italian writers, each writing a book about their travels in India. The story is there to teach us about singularity, what it means to be unique, but also comparable and common.

Monkeys frequently appear in Indian ecosystems. When
an old friend of mine was planning to spend a year
working with a literacy NGO in Sri Lanka, we warned
him to watch out for monkeys who had been trained to
pick pockets. We may have been a little racist.

Alberto Moravia was an anti-fascist writer, atheist, and wrote with a clinical precision in his style. I know him best as the author of the novel The Conformist, which I’ve never read. But I’ve seen the cinematic adaptation of The Conformist many years ago, so long ago that I can barely remember it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a provocateur writer and filmmaker, whose political sympathies leaned toward the autonomist movement. He was openly gay in a robustly homophobic Italy. 

His film Salo: 120 Days of Sodom is famous for how its grotesquerie and cruelty shocked Italian society. I haven’t seen that, but I’ve read a small novel he wrote about street gangsters from the slums of Rome, A Violent Life. I found it on a bookshelf in my grandparents’ old house in Montreal; it used to belong to my father.

Pasolini was killed on a mafia hit in 1975, brutally beaten and mutilated, then run over multiple times with his own car.

Moravia wrote An Idea of India. Negri describes it as a story of Moravia’s confusion at this country. He tried to understand it, but constantly found himself utterly and completely alienated from Indian culture and society no matter how many places he visited and how many people he spoke with.

He ended up simply grasping at ideas that barely made sense, and certainly couldn’t cover all of what he found so strange and otherworldly about the country. Moravia thought of India as a pure Other, utterly unlike his own country and social world.

Pasolini had an opposite experience that looks more progressive at the outset, but is actually just as blinkered. He travelled, met people, and saw poor people struggling to get by. He saw people with simple dreams working hard and looking for the opportunities to achieve them. 

There were even street urchins running through the streets of Mumbai, and Pasolini saw that they were exactly the same as Italy’s. 

Everybody has to eat. It's just a matter of what you eat.

Negri’s lesson from this story is that neither Moravia nor Pasolini are right. That’s because they both see the culture of India only in comparison with their own Italian and European culture. They take Europe as the neutral standard of comparison: How different or similar is India to Europe?

In asking that question, no matter what their answer is, they end up missing the point. Because the real question that guides you to find out the nature of a place and a culture you don’t know isn’t, “How does it resemble or differ from my own?” 

It’s “What’s all this? What’s going on here?”

Those kinds of questions take you to the nature of the culture, history, institutions, politics, families, moralities, of the place and people themselves. That’s really all that singularity means, despite some of the talk in academic philosophical circles about how difficult this term is.*

* I think this reputation is just because Gilles Deleuze primarily developed the contemporary concept of singularity, and a lot of people in the academy presume Deleuze’s writing and ideas to be difficult and obtuse. Once you realize that he’s actually writing very clearly and explicitly the entire time, you understand that these terms aren’t difficult at all.

When we understand what’s going on in a place and among a people, we can work out what’s similar and different compared to our own culture. Or what movements exist in common between our cultures, where they can help each other. 

But that kind of solidarity only starts once you approach that culture without preconceptions. Accept what is for the way it is, and you won’t feel lost or deluded at all. You’ll have learned with respect about another’s nature. That’s the beginning of a global movement.

#KeepHydroPublic: Private – Public – State, Jamming, 03/03/2016

So last night, I went with Phil Trotter and I.Borg* went to a public meeting organized by the Ontario New Democratic Party – Keep Hydro Public. I posted a solid twitterstorm from the meeting, culminating with directions to YouPayThePrice.ca, the NDP’s online set of advocacy tools for you to bug the provincial government until they shut down the privatization.

* Just a note on my ridiculous aliases for my friends here, and when I choose not to use them. In this case, the minute you stand for election for a government office, you become a public figure. So I refer to you by your real name. If you haven’t purposely made yourself publicly known in the media somehow, I’ll come up with a ridiculous nickname for you. W, eat your heart out.

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath and Brampton MPP
Jagmeet Singh talk to a room full of pissed-off Torontonians
about the importance of publicly held utility companies.
Photo by me, standing in the back.

So let’s get the immediately practical part of this post out of the way first. The Wynne government of the province of Ontario has begun selling its ownership of Hydro One, the provincial hydroelectric utility. 

I think this is a terrible idea for all the reasons described at YouPayThePrice.ca. Privatization of public utilities inevitably leads to higher prices to increase the short-term profits of the company, and because privately held utility companies can’t rely on the broader tax revenue of a state government to fund investments and upkeep. 

Also, rural (and very indigenous) areas of Ontario will remain separate from the province-wide hydroelectric grid because a private utility won’t see any profit from the dispersed transmission lines needed for rural electrification.

That's the practical stuff. But there are philosophical issues about what exactly constitutes public ownership that are important to the right-wing opposition to publicly held utilities and services. Issues that advocates for state-run companies need to confront if we’re to achieve victory on all fronts.

There are two cases on the right in favour of privatizing all public utilities and resources. One, which I’ll call the conservative case, is the weakest: it’s the pure concession to a corporate venture capital lobby. The conservative politician’s friends at the golf club who work for a venture capital firm want to buy the power utility, so the conservative politician sells it to them.

A simple rebuttal: This is blatant government corruption, and we should send these people to prison.

The powerful right-wing case for privatization I call the libertarian case. This is the contention that, a) there is no such thing as public ownership because we are all disconnected individuals competing for our unique individual interests. So-called public ownership is therefore actually state ownership.

States are tools of oppression, says the libertarian. States use coercion, whether through the military and police, or through tax collection and regulations, to force otherwise free individuals to obey its commands. So in the hands of the state, a public utility like the power company is a means to extort money from free people.

The slogan is literally what state-owned utilities in
democratic countries are for.

If power generation and delivery were privatized, goes the libertarian-right case, it would be delivered in a competitive market that would encourage more efficiency. So people could choose which hydroelectricity supplier they could support as a customer. They could also choose to go off the grid entirely and generate power by other means, or live without power entire. It’s your free choice.

My own position seems contradictory, or at least paradoxical. I do believe that the state, throughout its history as an institution, is an instrument of violence on people. Any examination of the power of the police will show that. 

But public infrastructure like electricity generation and transmission can’t be brought into existence by a market of private suppliers alone. That’s because of the nature of return on investment.

Private investment is driven by the need to maximize returns. This is how venture capital companies like Bain Capital or 3G operate. They buy assets – other companies and utilities – and radically restructure them, liquidating divisions and firing many workers, to create a large one-time influx of cash. 

All this cash brings the value of the company up enough for their investors to profit from a very high income when they sell their shares. The venture capital investors have a strong ROI, even while they leave behind scattered wrecks of what were once viable businesses.

The culture of private investing values high ROI in the short term over long-term viability. You don’t make $1-billion in a month with long-term viability. You build a community with long-term business viability, but building a community doesn’t maximize quarterly ROI.

So no, a public utility isn’t ever truly owned by the public. Hydro One is a state-owned entity. But in a democratic state, the public have a voice in exercising control over any entity owned by the state. And the public has an interest in building strong communities.

An enlightened public has an interest in rural electrification to indigenous communities, for example, even if it won’t have an immediately high ROI. Rural electrification instead extends a community into previously isolated regions. It’s the same for all infrastructure. Private investors have an incentive against building new infrastructure because it’s difficult to monetize it for immediate ROI.

A democratic state is a tool for people to build vibrant, prosperous communities. If Hydro One is controlled by a democratic state that obeys the commands of its people, it will help build a community throughout the province of Ontario.

It Ain’t My Revolution, Research Time, 02/03/2016

When I got to that part in Multitude, I couldn’t quite understand why Antonio Negri kept talking about peasants. This is a major section in the fourth chapter where he furiously critiques the conceptions of peasantry and peasants that left-wing revolutionaries have developed over the last century.

People have a lot of misconceptions about peasants. For
one thing, they weren't all organized as anarcho-
syndicalist communes.

I mean this seriously – he reads with a tone of exasperated frustration. It’s as if he’s just so angry that writers and politicians who he clearly respects so much just won’t stop making the same mistake. Over and over again. 

That mistake is making the peasant into a kind of revolutionary. A universal revolutionary, one for the whole world. Or else, as an ideal for the perfect communal life. 

I remember reading Peter Kropotkin discussing the medieval peasant villages this way. They were places where people could work for the subsistence of the community, there needed to be no strong authorities when everyone looked out for each other. 

These harmonious communities were eventually overrun as state armies, loyal to dukes and kings, came to establish their administrations. Then came centralized bureaucracies. Government management. The department of statistics so they authorities and their militaries and police could manage the populations. Freedom disappeared.

The ideal of socialist revolution in the 20th century was, in the minds of the idealists anyway, about restoring that kind of society. The reality was an even more pervasive and oppressive state apparatus than had ever existed – the omnipresent police and constant violence of Stalin’s purges. Or the hurricane of chaos that was Mao’s China of continual revolution.

The ideal of the peasant is a dream. Not even a dream, but a half-memory. The wish that we could live in a world without scarcity, where a community could live in harmony together without having to worry seriously about sustaining your life or keeping safe. 

Western revolutionaries rarely
understood that you couldn't make
a universal type from a peculiar
European tradition. They didn't
even understand that peasants
were only European.

It’s the land of do-as-you-please. It wouldn’t be so bad.

But to keep the dream alive, the writers and theorists who wanted to liberate humanity saw ghosts of that dream everywhere. The peasant of that peculiarly European community of small-holding farmers in medieval times couldn’t be found outside. Even if these theorists of humanity saw it in all the rural poor of China, India, and the tribal village networks of the West African coast. 

Read Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s memorial to the rural Igbo culture of Nigeria, the style of pride that killed itself rather than buckle down to the colonizers and missionaries. There’s a dignity to that life, and a nobility. But it’s not the peasantry that the marxists saw everywhere. 

Yeah, that’s who I mean. And it’s the object of Negri’s scorn. The marxist revolutionaries and theorists who thought the spectre of the peasant would be the beacon liberating humanity. They mistook a European peculiarity for a universal.

Anthropological science did the same thing, according to Negri. Sort of, anyway. Early anthropologists examined the rural indigenous cultures of the world as if they were a pure Other, a total alien compared to Western man. More often, the word was ‘primitive,’ the utter alien to ‘civilization.’

At best, those early anthropologists treated indigenous cultures as the most retarded humans. I mean that in its offensive, derogatory sense. Human civilization was popularly conceived as a single path of progress. 

That’s where the expression referring to Western civilization as the most ‘advanced’ came from. The indigenous, according to such an ideology, were societies that had the farthest to go to become truly advanced. To be the same as the West.

There was something of that attitude in even the most radical revolutionary marxism, according to Negri. The idea that there was a universal, single path to paradise, and that it was a Western path. 

But the anthropologists didn’t really learn anything about these people’s cultures by treating them as an Other, a primitive, or backward. Just as the marxists never founded revolutions to build the perfect society in their imagined universal worldwide peasantry.

You learn about people and peoples by understanding their singularity – the uniqueness that makes every personality and culture peculiar to its place, situation, and history. You learn when you ask someone who and how they are, not how they can teach you about yourself.

I’m Many Different Readers Myself, A History Boy, 01/03/2016

This cover is my copy.

Yesterday was the last post I had based on my notes reading Empire. I started Multitude a while ago, but I don't quite want to share that yet. I've also, in the spare moments I can get for it, been re-reading Soul Mountain.

I’ve mentioned Gao Xingjian on the blog before. I don’t know that I really got into much of my history with him. It’s a pretty simple story, really. One day when I was 17, I remember reading that a Chinese author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the first time.

His name was Gao Xingjian, and his most impressive, imposing, and inspiring large work was the novel/memoir Soul Mountain. Or Lingshan as the Chinese goes. So later that week, I went to my local Chapters and bought a softcover copy of the English translation.

Later that summer, I read it, entranced. At the time, I had just decided that I wanted to develop my fiction writing abilities and eventually publish novels. That this was something I wanted to do with my life.* And I had read James Joyce’s Ulysses earlier that year, which left me fascinated with how writing could play with subjectivity.

* Two books out already, plus a play produced and developing a couple of movies. Not bad.

This struck me most plainly about Soul Mountain when I first read it. It’s composed of short chapters. Some unfold normally, from a realistic first-person perspective. But many chapters, especially in the first half of the book, are more impressionistic. 

They’re sparse descriptions of the physical environment, as if that’s no longer important. Instead, most of the writing is a biting back-and-forth conversation, written in second-person, between you and she. Most of these conversations are aggressive, lovers wounding each other.

Our author as a young man, wandering Sichuan and
Yunnan on an existential journey into the twisting
depths of his own mind. And to avoid the police.

Those formal innovations made the most impact on me initially. When I read Soul Mountain for the second time shortly after moving to Ontario, its formal quirks stood out for me again. I think it made me feel at home as I was building myself a new home for the first time.**

** Very unpatriotic of me as a Newfoundlander to say that a Chinese novel made me feel at home. Well, too bad for the patriots of my old country. Patriotism is just a gauche self-deception you share with a few million neighbours.

The third time, which I’m in the middle of now, is a very different experience. Yes, I see the formal experimentation. But I see more easily that Soul Mountain isn’t just an exercise in the depiction of subjectivity. It’s about the psychology of loneliness.

When Gao writes his intense chapters, ‘you’ is how you refer to yourself when you’re talking to yourself because there has been no one else to talk to for so long. And ‘she’ is the imagined amalgam of all the women that Gao has ever done wrong in his life. 

And when he’s relating some event that happened to him in casual style, he speaks from the ordinary first person because he doesn't crave company anymore. He’s with people. He doesn’t have to have these disorienting cyclones of conversations with imagined selves and lovers. 

• • •

A more recent photo of Gao, taken now that he lives in
France.

A curiosity I realized reading it now for the third time. Soul Mountain is written (in English) in the present tense. It made me think that having made such an impact on me, it influenced my decision to write almost all of Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense. 

It wasn’t a conscious homage or anything. I didn’t even think of Gao at all when I was writing that novel. It was more like, I didn’t think writing Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense was a big deal. The style just seemed normal to me.

• • •

I also now understand how incredibly different it must be to engage with Soul Mountain in the original Chinese, if only because I’ve read about how experimental it is with the Chinese language itself.

Gao wrote in colloquial Han Chinese, as well as in the dialects of ethnic minorities in Sichuan, and in classical dialects and registers. Its explicitly political content in this case – how the Chinese state suppressed the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities – becomes clear in the very words of the novel.

Many of the later chapters I didn’t really like when I first read it because they seemed focussed on folk singers and old men from traditions I didn’t understand. I wanted to see more perspectival gymnastics when I was 17.

A priest of the religion common to the
ethnic minorities of Yunnan, China, which
Gao observed throughout his long walk in
the 1980s.

But now, my sensibility has changed. I can more easily see the real human tragedy in stories like Gao’s encounter with an old folk singer who used to perform religious rituals before the government cracked down on local worship.

Gao goes with the old man on a comically long journey down narrowing, increasingly decrepit roads until they reach his village in the middle of the night. The old man's demonstrations of the old rituals draws a crowd until his performance for the sake of a visitor depending to be an anthropologist is another ritual. The community comes together again.

And then the town’s government and army representative comes to shut down the performance because the old man never got the proper permit to perform the ritual. On top of that, the singer suffers one last indignity – the officer is his oldest son.

I think I’ve become a better reader, writer, and person for knowing to engage with these stories of lost and oppressed cultures instead.