Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A novel about nothing...ness

From TV series A Dance to the Music of Time, the Between The Wars British upper classes decaying, Time magazine considered this multibook series the 43rd most important novel of the 20th century...I don't know, somehow total obscurity might be a less disappointing accolade.

As one of the principle characters collapses into bed in a drunken stupor, asking for sleeping pills: I dislike waking at four...and thinking things over.Me, too.

Although bad boy stock broker Jonathan Cake brightens things up now and again...



PS.  By the end of the series, the suicide of the West is apparent. Lord Widmerpool says it all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

we know Ex Cathedra is a special 'hater' of journalists and has given his reasons. But the theme of "not wanting to think things over" connects with the DVD I watch'd tonight "Page One: Inside the NYT."

The movie's mostly on the situation of print journalism in the era of 'web-based' news, blogging, etc. In Heidegger's terms we could say that the developing news situation is there's no gathering logos.

It may seem offensive to apply "logos" to journalism, even "leading" or proud elite journalism such as that of the NYT. Nevertheless, the older news regime hierarchy ruled in Anglo-Saxony by the NYT etc provided a sort of "set of opinions and attitudes" which was useful for re-educators, including respectable conservatives but also cranks, to attack, revise, supplement etc. The NYT judged good and evil, rank'd religions and institutions, and in general provided a sense that the news wasn't merely 'one damn fact after another' (as Henry Ford said of History) or even merely 'one damn lie after another'.

Without the regime of the NYT etc, the re-educators would have to start from scratch on their own (the NYT, that is, wouldn't be there as Old Scratch for them to depend on).

We must suppose that if a news regime were desired by the powers, they would do something to replace the NYT etc with web-based institutions that provide a similar proud elite worldview and attitude. But the advantage of not having an official news worldview is that an as if original primordial desolateness and perspectivelessness can come into view, except that "Ah! Now I see that I foundationally don't understand!" isn't exactly a possible "view."... For our situation, the desolateness is obscured by the jumble of news information and valuations. (Tohu isn't empty, only without form. The bohu, the formalisms that routinize, are empty.)

For the situation in Orwell's 1984 is not really that we don't have enough information about what the government and multinational corporations and cultural institutions etc are "really doing." The 'real' version of »The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism« was not accessible, or maybe it is accessible but not readily recognized as such.

The ancient regime of the NYT conceal'd the real version of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism." An adept student of the NYT could fancy that he had a real understanding of stuff (e.g. Watergate), and a real sense of how to rank e.g. Darwinism vs creationism, or that Darwinism supports cooperative efforts and thus government programmes are helpful.

Anonymous said...

As the NYT regime continues to decay and no isn't replaced by pragmatically definitive web-based news institutions that provide a replacement quasi-logos, re-educators will be at a loss. If a foreigner wanted to learn what high-class Americans believe and feel and value, he wouldn't be able to discover this because America wouldn't really have a "newspaper of record."

Even master systems such as the Qabala may be stymied. Qabalists perhaps can be sure of the general patterns that must occur in domination and so forth, but bohu doesn't determine the contents of the tohu. ... One of Hegel's most philistine statements proposed »Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.«

According to Time magazine, Barth advised young theologians "to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.'" Newspapers even study'd contra their own pride perhaps aren't sufficient for a presentation of one's time to judge it by the Bible. But this seems to me to provide a possibly proper orientation.

Barth apparently also said “Revelation is not a predicate of history, but history is a predicate of revelation” [sc historia causes the events in time]. A follower appends, »So, yes, the Bible in one hand – the right; the newspaper in the other – the left.« Shem leads from the newspaper, Canaan is guided by the Bible in replying.

The growing absence of any coherence or routinization -- even a bogus coherence as provided hitherto by the NYT -- will feel freeing, but maybe only at first (cf re Nietzsche, gay Science ¶124 re the horizons of the unroutinized).

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