#tempted to become pan just because their flag makes sense

[ratherhavetheblues]

CLAIRE DENIS’  WHITE MATERIAL “Nothing’s mine. But I’m in charge.”

© 2018 by James Clark

     Sometimes it pays to be ridiculously late. Years ago, I saw two or three of the films of Claire Denis, and  wrote them off (figuratively) as overwrought, Grand Guignol melodramas pertaining to the outrageous predations upon Africans. Failing to heed the well-known predilection of auteurs to sermonize bullshit about their efforts seeing eye-to-eye with politically correct dullards, I left that hidden and unbeknownst treasure to pursue the singularities of quite untrammeled sensibility within the wheelhouses of the likes of Wong Kar Wai, for instance (his, Happy Together [1997], recently posted).

Having also been a latecomer to the skills of Ingmar Bergman, there were notions about Denis’ extremities which began to make much more sense. Since her film, White Material (2010), is copiously woven with the cosmic elements to be seen in Bergman’s, The Seventh Seal (1957), that seems to be a good starting point. It is fearlessness, not salvation, being the essence of Bergman’s work; and it is fearlessness, not foreign aid, of the essence of Denis’ work. Therefore, our first step has to do with our protagonist, Maria, tempting the fates by refusing to get away from the collision of rebel and French colonial militia forces in mid-century Africa. At a road on her coffee plantation she is visited by a hovering French Army helicopter, from which the following one-way dialogue screams: “Madame Vial! The French Army is pulling out! We’re leaving! You’ll be completely cut off! Think it over, Madame Vial! Think of your family… We’re pulling out… You must leave immediately.” Madame Vial swishes away as best she can the reddish soil kicked up by the chopper, which resembles a dinosaur, especially its image as a shadow in flight (a fossil), a commotion whose time has passed in a peculiar way. The retreaters shower down many black containers with the words, “Survival Kit,” prominently inscribed. Maria, after lifting one up, tosses it away contemptuously.

Before that aerial, long-distance event, we are privy to her presence in close-up—a performance carefully defining why (for better or worse) she won’t take orders from French rationality. At the film’s outset she seems at her wits’ end, treading along a dusty rural road. A car approaches and she screams, “Pull over!” Aggrieved and more anxious than ever after that rebuff, she does manage to attend to her shredded emotions. She becomes angry and her gait becomes informed with resolve, a march. Then she swings into a jog which soon becomes a marathon flow. Her panache is tripped up, however, by the appearance along that artery of a truck carrying militiamen sitting rigidly and myopically and failing to notice her crouching in the bush along the road. She resumes her run, now in full stride as if mindful of competition needing to be met with formidable rigor, distinct from that of the semi-professionals seated in that truck. So rhythmic is her take-off, that one might imagine her being a master of tuning discovery to notable power. That her mastery is contingent, though, soon plays out when, having brought her run to a cement highway, she hails by gesture, the screaming silenced, an overloaded bus. “Can I get in?” she asks of the driver. “No,” he declares. “No room.” (And therewith the sinuosity of Joseph and Mary, in The Seventh Seal, joins the search.) Some considerate soul on the roof calls out (to the only white to be found), “Hey, climb up here!” Instinctive composure leads her to prefer staying on a rung of the ladder leading to the overflow (and perhaps an undertow). (A ladder being a place of motion.) “I’ll stay here, thanks…” As the cruise resumes, Maria, in close-up, and shaken, measures what her venture means. One meaning we can well discern is her isolation. Also, without a word, she shows us that she has entered a death-trap. A mountain range in the distance infers that her marathon skills have encountered an impossible terrain. (The name-plate on that back of the vehicle, “Tricolino,” evokes a tripartite situation, one facet of that tripling being the three colors of the French flag [and another facet being synthesis, dialectic, the domain of Bergman, and his theme song of the impossible trick]). That the term is placed in a rather careless art deco font perhaps implies that the rigors of fusion making demands upon her have not been appropriately rendered. But, on the other hand, amidst the rattle and roar of the bus, she claws herself back to equilibrium. Seen in close-up, from the interior of the back-seat window, her face is contorted but her hands are large (remarkable for such a slight figure) and sinuous in gripping the ladder. Seen from outside, she now remarkably presents as an uncanny ease. Her mouth is set, her eyes are calm. A view of her right biceps casts her unmistakably as inured to hard physical labor, having a priority of muscularity (with perhaps scant circumspection). A militia jeep brings the flight to an abrupt halt. Our volatile protagonist becomes a study of terror and defeat. She looks around, frantically. Inside, it’s the French-trained trooper, trained in violent arrogance: “Driver. Papers!” Outside, another grey-uniformed, French-chosen, pulled-out-of-destitution public servant swaggers along the outside of the bus and encounters Madame Vial. He demands, “Where are you going?” She replies, “Home… the coffee plantation further down that way…” Having seen a lot of imperious, gallic, Cartesian dominance in his instructors, he proceeds to enjoy cutting her down, as he, no doubt, had been similarly treated on the road to being an effete prig. “There used to be a roadblock here. Did you ever pay them?” The coffee farmer, feeling bound to give an honest account to avoid a Kafka complication, replies, “Yes, I think I did once…” “How much?” the go-getter dictates. “About a hundred dollars,” is Maria’s admission to the free-lance auditor, with an audience to impress. “To those thugs?” he pretends to be aghast. “No wonder they act above the law!” Maria reasons (not her area of impact), “I had to get through… Everyone pays…” Her prosecutor/ highwayman continues with, “That’s what breeds corruption… Because of people like you, this country is filthy…” The military hero waves the bus through. Before he does, the stung target of his insult jumps into the in-fact-not-full premium seating and chooses a space at the back window. She looks out her new vantage point, and we might—in light of the difficult task of blending, in the air—see her on the hook to bring off an impossible trick of juggling, as posed by Jof, the circus caravan driver, in The Seventh Seal. Does her obsequious question, “Can I sit down, Sir?” account for such a creative move?” All around her, the passengers show fear. What made her smile in that context? On the soundtrack, a low, ringing sound wells up as the raw forest grinds by.

The passage we have just witnessed comprises, in fact, the run-up to the saga’s denouement. Her errant smile—to be distinguished from the valid upswings of her balancing act—locates her en route, her coffee enterprise defunct (her having driven her mutinous crew [“You bewitched us!”], with a gun to her head, to a supposed “survival” zone), to reach the blood-bath at the farm and, like the off-kilter in the bus, machete her venal (and yet considerably sound) father-in-law for having, along with her already shot-dead ex, courtesy of the militia, signed-off the property to the venal, indigenous mayor of a nearby town.

As with the work of Bergman, particularly, The Seventh Seal—in a time of lethal plague and venal scheming—it is Maria’s having entered an arena of sensibility tempering “survival” with hitherto discounted wit and grace, which galvanizes this film. Therefore, the eventuation comes at us not in lineal order, but for the sake of heightening the protagonist’s performance of a priority our world seems to be allergic to. The performance of a pair of medieval and middling jugglers, musicians and clowns (in the film from the distant past) upstages an earnest campaign to gain favor from a powerful dictator seemingly rewarding a binge of personal advantage. They turn that trick by way of momentary “vision,” sensuous disposition offering a perspective upon nature vastly unlike “the real world.”

Thus, cutting away from Maria’s being insulted by the pedestrian, stuff-shirt, venomous African cop, we have, from quite a few days before that bilious bus ride, one of her own moments of “vision.” In close-up, she is at her red-soil property, on her dirt bike, and on top of the world. Her face is ecstatic, her head lifted to the heavens, the wind whipping in her hair, and the ferocious noise of the machine only augments her joy. Though we’ve already seen her having been beaten down (just as Jof was beaten down by the barflies in The Seventh Seal) we can call her an “acrobat” of sorts. Jof, you’ll recall, had hoped their baby boy, Michael, would become an acrobat. But not only that, he was attentive to the boy’s necessity of, beyond a flash in the pan, being a “juggler” (a weaver of disparate initiatives, which he cites for being “one impossible trick”). We receive a long take of her visit to those special sources for her to fly with and thereby become a creative partner. Still in close-up, she lifts her left hand and spreads her fingers in contacting a pure dynamic she conveys to be her homeland. Then the right hand tests the current. It leads our eyes to the branches overhanging the road, now a blur, more motion than matter.

This bracing moment, however, was not without its evil. That cut to before the wheels fell off  presents the reddish-haired head and shoulders of Maria from behind; but it could just as well have been her girlish son, Manuel, a teenager, spawned with that Andre she once married and quickly left (but also stayed on , as the only business person on the plantation). (Could there be something called a Californian Frenchman? When Andre uses that bike, it’s Easy Ridertime, also into death, by way of mawkish, sluggish self-adoration.) That Maria has made impressive inroads into creative action is not in question. That her accomplishment is glaringly incomplete—and nowhere more sordid than tolerating, even celebrating, the inertia of Manuel—is also a certainty. And “white material,” with its spray of connotations culminating in the factor of the skill of Maria, is all about having or not having—as with Bergman—what it takes to be a human (to master the “impossible”).

In the course of her seven-day work weeks, she (needing to replenish workers in face of the rebel threats against white enterprises and the questionable militia form of law and order) hires a new crew-boss who tells her of his young daughter being sick. Maria asks what’s wrong, and the new recruit can only say, “She’s in bed. She doesn’t move.” Maria recommends the clinic and he tells her, “It’s too late now.” That could be Manuel. But her self-importance (her competence in the fields being in direct opposition to her parenting) finds her stymied to act upon that responsibility, a stasis not touching the type of juggling being part of her strengths. She falls asleep during her dinner on the patio late one night, the night she brought her crew back to full strength. Her dream concerns a social visit to the mayor, a family man, surprisingly enough (but then his leaning had always been about advantage for the sake of domesticity, and the wider ranges of survival). “He’s [Manuel] grown up,” the host declares. It’s not just that. His mind runs all over the place. He’s become a dog…”/ “Insane,” Maria agrees. (That civic dispenser of blame surfaces as a measure of tone, not narrative progress, in a scene where Andre proposes to sell the farm [insolvent, it turns out to be, despite Maria’s strivings]. The mayor’s little daughter pops up with a bottle of Fanta, her favorite. Stolid sobriety, and infantile fantasy. The world in a nutshell; but not, despite slippage, the world of Maria.) “You botched it with him,” the voice of reason maintains. You didn’t finish the job.” (Very true. But her finish is light years away from his.) She laughs cynically, in face of that defeat.

The “insanity” of Manuel functions here, beyond the display of the protagonist’s dismaying dividedness, as a recurrent amazement  to Denis that sadomasochistic rampage flits across the appetites of a tasteless (Fanta-prone) populace. Maria—spurred to do something about Manuel’s sleeping  far into the afternoons, by Andre’s new partner declaring that her son from Andre is “different” (superior) to Maria’s sluggish output—forces entry to the bedroom and insists on his showing some sentience. In response he goes to the pool in the yard and floats on his back like a diseased seal. The silent, decisive, self-contained marathoner shrinks to the likes of, “Manuel, get up! How can you sleep all day in bed? I don’t know what to do. You disappoint me… Nothing interests you. You loaf around all day. We can’t talk. It’s like we don’t exist… I’ll send you to France. What happened? I can’t believe you’re my son. Losing a crop is worse than a fire. Letting your self go is the vilest thing a boy can do. It’s loathsome!” After she leaves to take up once again her (relative) success story at the coffee fields, two of the rebel children soldiers now drifting about the property in the absence of direction from their leader, “the Boxer,” mortally wounded and finding sanctuary of sorts in one of the plantation’s out-buildings, come close to harpooning  Manuel as he does absolutely nothing but leak incoherent venom. Andre chases them off and pampers the “not different” son. “It’ll be fine, son, you’ll see” [Andre’s counting on the mayor to follow up on the promise of escape in exchange for the business being as delicate and dull as his figurine boy].

The detour through the mayor’s office prepares for the prize-fight imagery to come as further sealing Maria’s darkening fate. Andre’s fatuous rationale to Cherif, the mayor, as to squeezing Maria out of the business and out of the monies left, “I’m protecting her from herself,” comprises a prelude to a spate of cat and mouse. “I’m glad to hear the plantation is worthless. I keep you alive. Without me you’d be rotting on the Garonne” [river, in France]. It’s a nice piece of land, but still, if I add up everything you owe me, I should first of all seize the plantation; and second, kick you out! And you’d still owe me and the government.” To provide additional nightmare, Cherif (almost “Cheri”) points out to Andre his “personal militia,” a group of bath house devotees. When Andre laughs, “Come on, spare me!” the family man/ politician prompt his bodyguards, “Anything to say?” “Yes,” they call out. “What is it?” the cheerleader prompts. “Knock down the rebels,” they chime, and they preposterously assume triumphant gestures.

Andre tells Maria about the close-call at the pool. “Two kids with a machete and spear…” Impassively she replies, “I’ll tell Jean-Marie [a previous crew-boss] tonight.” When the ex persists, “Those two kids were strange, threatening… attacking Manuel,” all she says is, “I’m going” [back to the microcosm and back to squelching the macrocosm]. Those trespassers soon show up again, wandering through the house with their hard eyes, and coming across a print showing medieval soldiers with hard eyes, consigning a “witch” to the stake. (Hello, Mr. Bergman. And your doomed witch and all that jazz, and malignancy, from The Seventh Seal.) Though our protagonist puts up a front that hard eyes mean nothing, her finding interest in the imagery of sadistic persecution reveals that it has, on occasions, anyway, occurred to her that the unfinished business of juggling needs attention. (Andre tries to get through to her that she won’t be able to sell the coffee now. But she cuts him off with, “You’re getting defeatist.”) Manuel is at home and he actually wakes up to see the invasion (though he is too late to see one of them find and pocket Maria’s handgun, salted away amidst her panties). The kids rush out, cackling like chickens, perhaps cock-fight birds. And Manuel, in this regard like his mother, discounts the violence overrunning the moment. Quaffing down an entitlement long past its expiry date, he pursues the primitive cynics. That he pads along, having not thinking that footwear might be necessary, cues up a soundtrack of that growling tone heard earlier. The undisciplined but advantageous squawkers see a new form of combat arising when Manuel cuts his foot. Taking off his jersey to mop up the blood and brush away some of the mud, he limps forward; and his “prey” sees him as an easy prey. Soon a machete is at his throat and Manuel is pushed to his knees. Now, at last, he realizes that the skinny adversaries will enjoy displaying that they are more powerful than he is. One of the illiterate boys cuts off a swatch of the truant’s locks, and then he sniffs the hair he holds in his hand. The arrested spear-thrower runs his hand over Manuel’s would-be bad-ass Gothic tattoos. “Yellow Dog,” the machete- and gun-totter sneers. One of the effectively bad-asses rips off his gold necklace. The machete blade returns to Manuel’s throat as his combat career seems to be at an embarrassing end. A German Luger gets loaded up and both of the black sociopaths shoot into the air while the white sociopath stays petrified on his knees. Manuel’s jersey has become a flag—a red flag of rebellion, but also a white towel of surrender.

This episode has an extension by way of the scuttlebutt hovering around the source of the homicide, namely, “The Boxer,” (who turns out to be crew-boss Jean-Marie’s nephew), and a fan, no doubt of boxer, Mohammed Ali, who performed in Africa at that era. Like “Gaseous Cassius,” he has covered himself with a mystique of superhuman imperviousness to pain and his branding includes nifty murals showing himself always a winner, flexing his muscles as if having just won a fight. (The flexing of Maria’s muscles had been far less focused and yet far more valid.)  In contradistinction to the mayor’s “fighters,” babbling about “knocking down” the upstarts, one of those posters persists near the mayor’s bailiwick, a portrait including the supposedly up and coming leader with a red star on his cap—part of the off-shore borrowing by which the self-styled salts of the earth expose themselves to be uninspired. Though the opening moment of the film shows him on is back, having died from a gunshot wound (militia men cautiously enjoying  the loss), we come to see in the prequel a stoic but less than heroic fabulousness. His devotees may prate about his invincibility, but we first see him (when alive) hitting the ground (as if by a plague) to avoid a truck full of underlings in the service of the French military, still in control despite rhetoric of liberation and self-determination. On his way to find a hide-out on Maria’s land and Maria’s sheds, he mounts a horse having been wandering on the property, and with his hoody he resembles a medieval soldier, recalling Block and Jons and their baggage, in The Seventh Seal. The plantation church he passes posts a sign, “God Doesn’t Give Up;” also, a cock struts around. Here he is noticed by a fan, and the discovery soon finds its way to the largely tiny army. The adult in charge childishly celebrates, “I knew it! They can’t take him down! If I could meet the Boxer, God could do no more for me! No KO’s!” Then a cut to the Boxer’s bleeding gut. Another cut features Maria calling out to Manuel, “Get up, Manuel, please! I need you!” The bedroom door is locked. Then she goes on to notice one of her sheds unlocked. There she meets the Boxer who is lying down but not as inert as Manuel. She asks, “Are you Jean-Marie’s nephew?” On hearing her guess was right, she asks, “Does he know you’re here?” The nephew (suddenly becoming less than huge), looks to his swollen reputation, by way of, “He’ll be glad to see me” [the awesome celebrity]. She offers him a drink of water and some rice in a bowl. Closely following this hiatus, there is Maria berating the staff for its “pulling out.” “You don’t get it! You let them scare you!” [in the back of her mind she knowing herself to be pretty tough—tougher, more regal, than the Boxer; but, as we well recognize, foolishly, which is to say, weakly, overestimating her strengths]. A pirate radio DJ cuts in, quixotically devoted to reggae, not African music, and he emotes, “Listen to my words, fearless young rascals. The Boxer is back! He’s in hiding. Go find him. Go out there and find him!” Another communique, even more fevered than the last, reads, “Some have walked a hundred miles in search of the Boxer…”

The two little punks, loosely linked to the slipshod “revolution,” had been bright enough—clever in their endless delinquency—to choose restraint in delivering punishment to a victim and thereby avoiding consequential punishment to themselves. The brush with violence had left the clueless Manuel stripped to his underpants and frozen by the danger and humiliation, staring at the unforgiving scrubby turf. Andre comes along, and for the second time sends away the lively incidence of plague. He and the straw-boss provide some clothes, and Maria is nonplussed but not visibly shocked or dismayed (her temperance coinciding with the slipperiness of the punks). She and the paid troubleshooter inspect a hole in the fence. She says, “It’s been like this for months.” Then, after looking for footprints, she declares, “Must be young shepherds…” (That could be an ironic reprise of the rapist-murderers-shepherds, in Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960].) Manuel and Andre are card-carrying sheep. But Maria, the centre of gravity here, is much more difficult to assess. Manuel unconvincingly tries to maintain he hurt only his foot. (The assembled burly, balanced and adult breadwinners/ farm hands witnessing the ridiculous coward being given a ride home constitute a silent jury.) Though he soon hops off the truck to get going on a pathetic rehab, he has been captured for us as a rendition of the retarded “witch” in her tumbril, burning by consensus, in The Seventh Seal. As the war and the plantation go up in flames, what remains of Manuel is shown by a  quick cut of his head reduced to something close to a scorched potato. For a real rally, there is Jof, in the aforementioned film, having been humiliated by a savage mob; and riding high at the end of the saga. That recurrent, ominous ringing tone during the carriage-trade send-off of Manuel leaves no residue of musicality upon Maria, in pathological denial about weakness needing to be checked, lest sadism prevail. “This is nothing,” she says, of the slip in the field. He is nothing, per se. But he and his ilk are an essential element requiring ruthless alertness.

Having left the truck, the loose cannon rushes home to shave his head, take a shotgun, abuse his step-mother (bound for the encampment without a clue), and joins the children’s army where he is but one of very many slaughtered by the militia in his stone-castle-like home. The optics of his demise are part of a rich study of physicality in a time of protracted presumption, a time where no one—unlike the players, Joseph and Mary, in, The Seventh Seal—devotes sufficient energy to acrobatics and juggling. (In his new provocation of lousy theatre messing with the protagonist’s equilibrium, Manuel coincides somewhat with lousy playwright, Minus, knocking off the equilibrium of Karin, in, Through a Glass Darkly [1961]). The tiny rebels had been instrumental in shooting up the local pharmacy and absconding with a remarkable number of tiny pills for every occasion. Their display, among which of course included Manuel, of gobbling down chemical aid like ravenous birds in a berry patch, strewn over a swatch of mud after readily solving the baby screw-caps, gives us a taste of the decidedly trivial political red herring this production has mounted. (For those who can never see any farther than politics [as complemented by science, religion and humanitarian morality], as the route to humanity, this film will forever be shuttered.) The “rebels” experience high confidence from their murderous theft; but real playfulness, real delight, does not come close. Before he’s shot dead, his body dragged from his ham-radio studio, the DJ had told the world, as far as he could see it, “Herbs to tone those flabby muscles, and render you invincible and invulnerable…” (This time Haight-Ashbury—as Jamaica, before—becomes a beacon with no light.) Maria, hearing this recommendation with no confidence, recalls her bus ride after the insult, and her being at a loss, lacking the muscle, her bicepts notwithstanding. The survival kits and the order to leave that world offends her risk-taker’s spirit. But her misreading of advantage slams her closer to Manuel and Andre than she should be.

The exuberance of this catastrophe plays out in a supplemental rain of cruel irony. Necessities capable of burnishing the protagonist’s resoluteness fall like ash in her hands. She beholds a Toyota loaded down for the sake of surviving the conflict. And though she feels nothing but disdain toward what she proudly regards as squeamishness in others, she is readily duped into childish, skittish, toy-like thoughtlessness, including disregard for the malignancy on the ground nearby and the malignancy all over the planet. The large, cinderblock homestead tranquillizes her—as did the stone castle of Antonius Block and his guests, in The Seventh Seal—to the extent that such an edifice and its concerns must be too big to fail. One of her longest-staying workers, Angel, now about to cut and run, has a life-sized wooden figure of a man on her worker’s veranda. (That would coincide with the large, inert sculpture on the veranda of a beach house being abandoned in Bergman’s film, Persona [1966].) Inside a meal of fresh vegetables is on the table. But the door is locked. (Block being denied the substance of heaven. Maria being denied, due to failing as an acrobat and a juggler.) The close-formation of the many cyclists abandoning the farm evokes the closely-linked dance of death by Block and his retainers. In her disappointment Maria wanders to an area of the property being impassible due to a mass of shattered tree trunks. In the Bergman film, Through a Glass Darkly [1960], a woman disappointed by her mojo leaving her, hides in the wreckage of a big wooden fishing boat. Her next step consigns her to a mental hospital. But with Maria, the tone is, “Maurice [Angel’s husband], we don’t need to be terrorized. We can fight back!” She runs into a rebel roadblock and has to pay to proceed. The point, however, has to do with the leading gunman having been Manuel’s gym teacher. The real drama being, what kind of athletes are stepping up to the plate? Similarly, when Maria visits the pharmacy for the grandfather’s medications the (soon-to-be murdered) pharmacist tells her, “It’s all here, except for the oxygen…” Seen, as so often in close-up from behind, Maria overhears the DJ’s pep talk to the converted. “Many things are to be found in Mama and Papa’s house. But go about it gently. Everyone is entitled to his share. And don’t ever forget what fate has in store for us … No one can take away your share. Beware of imposters…” Does Maria have any inkling that her excellent career could be tainted with imposture? The radio gate mouth goes on to a fact of life; but not a really significant fact of life. “As for the white material, the party’s over!” Showing the ropes to the new workers, while the “young rascals” are on a roof cutting the power lines, she blithely explains, “The power goes out often…”

With Manuel shaved down as he was in the prologue—shifting and crouching desperately in a nearly pitch-dark interior—he in fact shared the flickering launch with a pride of cheetah bounding across a road on the plantation. This spike of bemusement comes to clarification, later, regarding the early and unlamented death of someone who was dead to the world anyway. In the trajectory of that binge of fruitless go-pills, we see a wobbly Manuel on his domain encountering two, no-nonsense militiamen, training their rifles on his empty head. But, wait a minute, those gunslingers have turned out to be brimming with nonsense, in the form of cat and mousing the chump in that darkened place kicking things off to set a bilious tone. The cats then torch the mouse and the whole mouse-pack; but not before exacting a gory slaughter. That’s where the real cats come in, to put everyone to shame, including Maria, who would have got caught up in the sadistic frenzy—rather aptly, in fact, now operating, as a second front of massacre and becoming an Angel of Death, or, if you prefer, a carrier  of the plague which will always be with us.

After her pampering and loading on the truck the flabby boy having shown what he’s made of—“You’re my son. I can’t let you drift away…”—a cheetah by the road silently and expertly cuts the crap. In that interview with the Boxer, she tells us a lot. He asks, “Why didn’t you leave with your son?” She answers, “I’m a good fighter, too… How could I show courage in France? [but real courage being not a display of advantage]. It would be absurd, no rhyme or reason [how, then, is she doing with deep musicality, in Africa?]. I’d slack off, get too comfortable…” And here she is, giving a quick and comfortable rundown to the new, and last, crew: “Nothing’s mine, but I’m in charge.” One of those grounded laborers she could have learned something important from, tells her, “If it’s not yours, it’s just smoke.”

#claire denis

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Personally, I don’t think “the left” ultimately represents much of anything coherent, but rather constitutes a historically contingent coalition of ideological positions. Bastiat and other free market folks sat on the left of the french assembly, and while we might try to claim that as part of a consistent leftist market tradition, we should be honest that one’s position in that particular revolution — much less revolution in general — is hardly indicative of very much. There are always revolutionaries who desire systems far worse than our own, and similarly there have been many broadly recognized “leftists” whose desires were utterly anathema to liberation. It’s popular these days to paint the left and right as egalitarian versus hierarchical. But not only is this an imposed read on a far messier historical and sociological reality, but it’s honestly quite philosophically contentless. No one is particularly clear on what egalitarianism means, or even hierarchy, and many interpretations are not only mutually exclusive, they reveal supposedly identical claims as actually deeply antagonistic. Does egalitarianism mean everyone gets precisely the same wealth (however that’s supposed to be measured)? Does it mean mere legal or social equality in the abstract realm of relations before The People or The State’s legal system? Does it mean equal opportunity for economic striving or does it mean equal access to the people’s grain stores? Does equality supersede all other virtues like liberty? Is it better to all be oppressed equally than to have some achieve greater freedom? I’m not being facetious. We paper over these deep issues with “well but common sense” and the wishful assumption that our comrades will come down on the minutia the same way we would, sharing our intuitions on various tradeoffs, but that’s empirically not the case. We constantly differ. People talk about “collective direct democracy” as if something being the near unanimous will of some social body constitutes an egalitarian condition. And, sure, it does under some definitions. But the moment I see some collective body trying to vote on my life I don’t want to “participate” I want to chuck a bomb at it. Leftists use both the slogans “power to the people” and “abolish power” — this should be an intense red flag to everyone that completely different conceptual systems and values are at play. It’s delusional in the extreme to suppose that if we sat down and talked about things we’d all end up on the same page. The assumption of pan-leftist solidarity or a shared common goal is a comforting lie. The left isn’t defined by some set of axioms in ethical philosophy that we can all agree on and than argue about derivations of strategy or implementation from. The left is a historical coalition thrown together by happenstance. As with revolution we tend to self-identify as the underdogs and build our coalitions from the classes we recognize as underdogs against the classes we recognize as ruling but this leads to all kinds of contortions. We are for the right to choose because women are the underdogs in patriarchy. But at the same time we’re pro vegan because animals are the (sometimes literal) underdogs in human domination. Wait, do we value all living things? What counts as a discrete living thing? Do we value them equally or is the level of consciousness/sentience important? Is it the level of dependence or strain it places on another person? Suddenly the responses we have in situations with family members versus the overdogs of christianity seemingly start to come into conflict with the responses we have in situations with disabled people (underdogs!). I’m not saying there isn’t a way to thread all these dynamics, to find a core ethical guide and nuanced attentive implementation — I think there is one (although my particular approach of ultimately recognizing a vast spectrum of sentience/consciousness between zygotes/nematodes and anyone remotely close to a conscious human is denounced by a number on the left as “unegalitarian”). I’m pointing out that our responses rarely arise from an ethical analysis but from instinctual responses to any appearance of an underdog. The left is rarely a philosophy, more often a coalition, with theory tacked on to serve the goals of binding that coalition together. One could easily imagine universes with different historical paths where outlawing abortion is a core leftist plank, seen as deeply interrelated with opposing queerphobia, patriarchy, ableism, etc. Or the left could oppose legal sanction, but support and build grassroots social and cultural sanction against abortion. (Again, for the record I’m pro-choice.) Underdogism is a really dangerous approach to the world. It’s a good “rule of thumb” but if you know anything about me it’s that I abhor such heuristics and see them as the opposite of radical analysis. Underdogism is how you get things like zionism, leninism, poc nationalism, TERFs, SWERFs, etc. Its failures are manifold. There’s a good case the left is nothing but underdogism — in which case fascism is almost always leftist. MRAs don’t approach politics like a reactionary on the right side of the French Estates General, consciously seeking to preserve an established ruling structure, they see themselves as the underdogs. Sure, they’re not (in almost everything besides some fringe contexts like some bits of divorce law), but fuck it they’re potential underdogs, and that status is more than enough to reproduce much of the standard structures of underdogism. One might interject that the problem with underdogism of the alt-right is not just their misidentification of underdogs but their hunger for power, and this is certainly broadly true (although a fraction of the alt-right actually seem less in it for power but more in it to drink outgroup/”overdog” tears). But this certainly applies to much of the left in good standing. Certainly many authoritarian leftists have hungrily latched onto underdogism as a potential ladder to power. I’ve met feminist writers who openly admitted to me they’d be patriarchal if they were men, or own slaves if they were antebellum rich whites. Yes, any set of smart persons who recoil at clear instances of oppression are gonna broadly converge on a number of positions or analyses. But the way they reconcile or hold together these things may differ dramatically. Just because the left is a stable coalition in our present context doesn’t mean aspects of it that seem in perfect harmony won’t break in wildly different directions should certain conditions change. I have repeatedly encountered leftists who’ve claim that valuing some things above other things is hierarchical and thus right-wing (leftism being in their minds representing something more like stoicism or buddhism). Similarly you find epistemic pluralism common in the most heads-up-their-ass sectors of left academia who think thinking some models of the world are more true than others is “unegalitarian” or even “totalitarian.” It’s tempting to just laugh about hippies and move on, but these sort of horrifically bad definitions of “egalitarianism” will sometimes come out of the mouths of smart people who generally have their heads on straight the moment they move to a context they’re unused to. Now I hate the NAP, but everyone laughs at the NAP these days for being “unpragmatic” and this has increasingly become tied to a casual indictment of all ethical philosophy itself. A turn that has been encouraged by the twin interrelated scourges of the modern internet far left: tankies and nihilists. This makes sense if — as per social justice — you see the point of the left to create a social framework of etiquette and loose ideology that can bind a coalition of underdog classes together. Thus the increasing refrain of “you can’t compare!” that happens whenever someone tries to tease out commonalities or contradictions between various claims, positions or planks. There is, from this perspective, no common root or unifying ethos to the left and we should not look for one lest the whole project fall apart. Philosophy, ethics, and core values or principles become the enemies, as does both methodological individualism and universalism. There are neither individual experiences nor universal ones, just relatively simplistic classes of people with incomparable experiences. And we bind them together into common cause by badgering, social positioning, poetic affective appeals, and threats of violence. The left isn’t unified by anything. Marxism is half discredited by idiocy and monstrosity and the half that survived became a wildly contradictory mess more preoccupied with obscurantism, irrationality and anti-realism to hide its own failures than getting anything done much less charting a path. Most of the concerns of the left refer to opposing mythologized superstructures that we are left flailing in the absence of or whenever their composition and behavior change. The left is, in short, utterly allergic to radicalism. Fending off its inadequacies with short puffs of extremism instead. As social and ideological complexities compound through the runaway feedback of the information age these internal tensions and the laughably frail taping over we’ve done will only become more clear. There is still hope for a radical anarchism that is willing to root its discussions of freedom and ethics concretely and explicitly. But this will necessarily involve casting off from many allies who we share some limited intuitions or momentary prescriptions with. Or at least dissolving the comforting delusions of a deep camaraderie. The only reason the lie of “the left” has persisted for two centuries is that its grand Manichean narrative of two more or less uniform tribes — one enlightened and one indecipherably morally corrupt — enables a sense of community that provides psychological comfort to many. To many on the left (as well as on the nationalistic etc right) a hunger for “community” is actually their primary motivation. When chatting at the bar it’s better to not look too deep into why you both oppose capitalists lest you discover something that sunders rather than binds. But the format of present internet technologies has had the reverse effect. Inescapable contact with The Enemy has led us to put up hostile discursive walls that naturally end up cutting out our traditional allies too, causing both right and left to fracture in desperate attempts to find purity, trustworthiness, or some kind of deeper binding. The happenstance points of unity that worked when we had little choice in who to befriend are now fracturing in all directions. This is largely a good thing, the last two decades have seen all manner of horrors lurking among our own ranks exposed. But the process that brings to light our lack of commonality with the anti-science leftist deep ecologist who wants to kill all humans is also a process that will ultimately rip “the left” to unsalvageable shreds. This ship is sinking. And just because many of the rats are fleeing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t either. http://clubof.info/