Alison and All--
Yes, the father figure of the State is very seductive.
Reading just that sentence from your response put me immediately in
mind of Odyssean Penelope
fearing, and yet not fearing--portrayed as brave for a real-life woman,
versus Athena & etc--
the missing patriarchal presence (Odysseus). She is represented as
dealing with the absence
on a survivalist, daily level. I've wondered, is that for lack of
another suitable (!--there are "suitors"...)
answer (another social paradigm)?-- some feminist critics have claimed
her as a strong figure
(I'd have to browse my shelves here
to list who, where, when the claims were written--I've been away from
discourse on the classics
for a few years) because of her wiles and apparent courage, and in that
she seems also not unlike Rosy the
Riveter types. But the ancient Greek culture is altogether too far
removed from any applications for us today,
excepting perhaps literarily and even that seems very remote in many
ways.
I'm thinking of Beckett's short piece for stage, "Not I," the character
named Mouth, a female character. Perhaps that
is more like what a response to the Arnold sense of State can be,
artistically, anyway. On the other hand,
I'm not at all take with the popular "Vagina Monologues," though I
suppose I should study them more,
and my own responses to them,
to see why.
I see the Arnold quote as significant in terms of a tautology of
absolutism:
how close it comes to totalitarian thought.
Even if he is assuming something of a democratic foundation for this
sense of State,
what he posits is also a static State in that it can have or acquire
absolute power
over its subjects. Thus, if its official managers decide to create laws
or even to circumvent
laws that protect citizen rights, whereby no one is allowed to question
what they do, then the democratic foundation goes out the window.
Arnold's is also a very privileged perspective,
vis, class-based hierarchies that gird the particular State and assumed
democractic
ideals he lived in and with. And then there is that other bugbear: the
idea of a nation, and how one
nation can be set in motion to seem in opposition to another nation.
Nationalism is
an interesting fiction that can lead to material and historically
fraught consequences, we know.
The danger of what Arnold says being only a step or two away from
totalitarianism
reminds me of a powerful letter written to
The New Yorker by Toni Morrison, in response to their Sept 11mourning
issue,
and to the inflammatory Bush rhetoric of the time, that began to impose
limits on freedom
attempting to justify that by fanning the flames of outrage and grief
here.
Morrison, like many then and since,
warned of the erosion of democracy, and she seemed to me very clear
headed about it.
But Bush is not the only reason democracy here seems dysfunctional, of
course--
he and his policies and those who promote him, along with the unwitting
in media,
as well as the aims of corporate globalism, seem all to have merged
into something
that innocent notions of individual freedom and political voice,
such as the idealism heard from Americans who think their democracy
is functional, cannot easily undo, much less respond to--they see no
need to respond:
gasoline is flowing if more costly, the tv is on, the internet purrs,
and tsunami's are terrible but
they happen far away ...
It all seems somewhat tragic that many good minds in this very
privileged western
culture are thus (apparently) disabled or disengaged from adequate or
meaningful response.
But then, thank goodness there have been far better thinkers than I
working on
and sorting out that problem for a long time, even if some of them were
weird as hell:
I'm thinking of Althusser: great thinker at sorting out and explaining
how people are sucked into the fiction of the State--but sheesh: he was
a wife beater!!!!
In fact I think he murdered her, didn't he?
Ugh.
I am not sure that western culture's stubborn reliance on reason
can help it much any more. Reason seems more than a little
overburdened, overrated even, or trumped (no pun there).
Well, on that note, I'm off here and back to my
other kinds of "hideous prosal turgidity."
But first here's a little poetry from Joseph Brodsky's
_So Forth_ (FSG, 1996) :
After Us
After us, it is certainly not the flood,
and not drought, either. In all likelihood, the climate
in the Kingdom of Justice, with its four seasons, will
be temperate, so that a choleric, a melancholic,
a sanguinic, and a phlegmatic could rule by turns
three months each. From the standpoint of an encyclopedia,
that's plenty. Although, no doubt, caprices
of atmospheric pressure or those of temperature
might confuse a reformer. Still, the god of commerce
only revels in a rising demand for tweeds,
English umbrellas, worsted topcoats. His most dreaded enemies
are darned stockings and patched-up trousers.
It would seem that the rain outside the window
advocates precisely this distinctly frugal
approach to the landscape--more generally to all creation.
But the Constitution doesn't mention rain.
There's not a single reference in the Constitution
to barometers or, for that matter, to anyone
who, perched on a stool, holding a ball of yarn,
like some muscular Alcibiades, passes the
night porng over a fashion magazine's dog eared pages
in the anteroom of the Golden Age.
And just one more note:
in addition to the week-long feature of Joe Ahearn on Texfiles, I put
up a special day's feature
of some poems from Hal Johnson, accompanies by something of an essay
in images.
Best Wishes to you all,
Chris
http://texfiles.blogspot.com
http://e-po.blogspot.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 08:59:29 +1000
Subject: Re: Vitriol
On 27/3/05 7:11 AM, "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> [Arnold is subject to an]... hypocritical agenda of colonizing with
the
> excuse of serving
> 'moral' standards.
>
> My take on it all also questions what interests are being served by
> this retro business
> of reinstituting a monumental kind of value/moral system--people in
> large numbers
> seem so taken by this kind of thinking every time it rolls around.
> In my opinion it mostly provides an excuse not to have to
> think hard on hard questions. Alas.
I guess the father figure of the State is very seductive, and it's all
linked with the idea of being safe, which itself is linked to fear and
paranoia. Arnold is not simplistic; but he was certainly all for the
(ideal) State and thought rebellion, no matter how justified it might
be,
was impermissible, as only the state could permit the "perfection" of
human
society and stave off anarchy. Here's a quote from Culture and Anarchy:
"And this opinion of the intolerableness of anarchy we can never
forsake,
however our Liberal friends may think a little rioting, and what they
call
popular demonstrations, useful sometimes to their own interests and to
the
interests of the valuable practical operations they have in hand, and
however they may preach the right of an Englishman to be left to do as
far
as possible what he likes, and the duty of his government to indulge
him and
connive as much as possible and abstain from all harshness of
repression.
And even when they artfully show us operations which are undoubtedly
precious, such as the abolition of the slave-trade, and ask us if, for
their
sake, foolish and obstinate governments may not wholesomely be
frightened by
a little disturbance, the good design in view and the difficulty of
overcoming opposition to it being considered,--still we say no, and that
monster-processions in the streets and forcible irruptions into the
parks,
even in professed support of this good design, ought to be unflinchingly
forbidden and repressed; and that far more is lost than is gained by
permitting them. Because a State in which law is authoritative and
sovereign, a firm and settled course of public order, is requisite if
man is
to bring to maturity anything precious and lasting now, or to found
anything
precious and lasting for the future.
"Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the State,
whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is the most
resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for
the
State which culture teaches us to nourish..."
And so on - it's a pretty familiar argument, on the whole, though we
usually
encounter it in a cruder form these days. I'm not at all certain that I
am a
revolutionary; but Mr Arnold seems to exclude the "Barbarians (and) the
Philistines (and) the Populace" (whoever they are) from the heritage of
culture, although they are all kindly allowed their share in perfection!
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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