Alex Torpey - the local revolution

Watch this space.

"There is no such thing as the "status quo" in society or in government. Things can get worse, or they can get better. And your government needs you if it's going to get better."

About the Russian fascination with the West which might soon, finally, start to wane.

...«Господи, да какие же мы русские? — мелькало у меня подчас в голове в эту минуту, всё в том же вагоне. — Действительно ли мы русские в самом-то деле? Почему Европа имеет на нас, кто бы мы ни были, такое сильное, волшебное, призывное впечатление? То есть я не про тех русских теперь говорю, которые там остались, ну вот про тех простых русских, которым имя пятьдесят миллионов, которых мы, сто тысяч человек, до сих пор пресерьезно за никого считаем...” ФМ Достоевский

...“Lord, what kind of Russians are we?”flashed through my mind from time to time while I was on the train. Äre we in fact really Russians?”Why does Europe create such a powerful, magical, alluring impression on us, no matter who we might be? That is, I am not speaking now of those Russians who have remained in  Russia, those simple Russians whose name is fifty million, whom we hundred thousand to this day seriously regard as nobodies..."
FM Dostoevsky

Being a visitor

Visitors are like deaf mutes. The emphasis goes on what's visible to the eye on one hand, and on the other those impreceptible details the intuition picks up that locals are probably oblivious to. The middle frequencies are largely shut out.

Melancholia - film

It's painful to watch but interesting to think about. He creates a terrifying dystopia where no-one is really connected to each other any more, nobody properly understands each other and everybody's trapped in their own little world. 

The setting is the party after a wedding. The parents of the bride hate each other, the groom seems to have no friends or relatives, the bride has difficult relationships with both parents, the father is completely narcissistic, the mother is authoritarian and hates all conventions and disrupts the party, there seem to be many acquaintances around but no friends, her boss is her husband's best man and gives a speech where he does not mention him but announces her promotion, he has a minion trailing around her through the evening in case she comes out with an advertising tagline, her brother in law keeps reminding her about how much money he spent on the wedding and how many holes there are in the golf course, she promises to keep forever a photo her husband gives her but forgets a few minutes later, clearly showing they have not established a proper relationship... and so on. 
People converge but they never establish a bond that's sufficiently strong to be mutually nourishing, only to just about be mutually supportive at a given mutually advantegeous juncture, which is an entirely different thing. The two sisters try to mend their bond and create an intimacy in the second half of the film, but it's too little too late.

A very nice metaphor for that is the sticks that support each other to create a teepee effect under which they hide at the end of the world. It's a pathetic haphazard structure under any circumstances and (although the protagonists themselves intend it to be symbolic) is completely useless to confront the oncoming cataclysm. This final scene, where they hold hands under the teepee very nicely underlines their vulnerability, and that everything at the end of the day is about no more or less than human relations and theirs are as inept as the three sticks leaning against each other.

So the heroine is depressed, her sister is half-depressed and everyone has got issues to different degrees. They live in this suffocating, bad taste universe of wealth, in a dreadful castle that is all varnished and the most unpoetic place you could imagine (despite the lovely setting), where everything is perfectly manicured and there's no compromise with nature and where they are separated by the status their wealth gives them from any cut and thrust of life there may be out there. 

So in these kind of conditions, no wonder the end of the world will come along soon, even if it seems at times to be a false alarm. It works well as a social satire showing the dynamics that engender spiritual destruction. I'm not sure what else it could be about apart from that.

St. Pete

I always reserve the harshest words for those I'm close to. This is the best way I can think of to excuse my mainly critical words when writing about St Pete. If you've already detected from the last sentence that I could be inclined to slipping into a city-as-person metaphor, you won't be disappointed.


St Pete is so damn big and spread out, it goes on and on, with far too many empty buildings in it's centre so that its heart beats very slowly, almost inaudibly. In fact there is no centre. In Moscow, everyone knows where the centre is, and everything radiates from there. In St Pete, in the place where the centre should be, there's just water.


This absence of a centre makes people even more aware of where the real one is: for such a big proud city, it's painfully out of reach 670km south. Hence the city's strange swampy lethargy is redoubled by this lack of focus.


There are certain people you can meet who are alluring in their ability to be sometimes very charming and at others terribly indifferent. You grapple to find their heart: some solid yet tender area which, if reached, might give you a measure of the person and something worth gripping on to. But with some people it's just like St Petersburg, as you get closer to where you hope to find the heart, you find instead a kind of dark watery current that pushes along silently and can't possibly be seized.

How do you uproot entrenched oligarchies?

View across eastern Libya

 © David Degner

The problem the crowds are trying to solve in the Middle East with their repeated demonstrations is alot greater than installing democracy through a system of fair elections. It's the far trickier business of peacefully uprooting a political and economic structure that serves the vested interests of a tiny minority of people. If it were  a plant, the dictator is just its flowery head. It can be lopped off, though soon another very similar flower will bloom after a short spell as a demure bud. Having to dig around and uproot the whole thing, leaving a big messy hole in the ground is a completely different matter.

To extend this handy horitcultural metaphor, democracy even in developed counties seems to be not that much more than a process where through some clever grafting, you get a pleasing seasonal variation in the colour of the flower, while the plant itself largely remains the same. If they do find in the Middle East a way to remove the entire plant peacefully, fill the hole, and level out the terrain for a real fresh start then it would certainly be a great example for the entire world. I can think of few places where achieving this periodically without bloodshed would not be a good thing. It's a pity democracy as it is practiced currently cannot solve this issue, though maybe some kind of democratic process could. I wonder what that process might look like.

Discomfort with photos

I've had to cultivate a detachment from photos and other "things" in general to stop me from going crazy.

Only reality is worth investing emotion into.

"Never let anything 'artistic' stand in your way" has sort of become a motto for me, stolen from Bruce Chatwin (who got it from Noel Coward).

Some photos are far more engaging than others, but in the end each seems to offer just a quick emotional hit that rapidly fades.

Meanwhile, irrespective of its aritstic qualities, each one is asking for far more trust than it should be getting.

What bothers me is photography's uneasy, unsettled relationship with reality, how photographers often pose as witnesses when they're really manipulators - both on the field and in how they present things afterwards.

There would be a much more guarded response to images were this element of manipulation not all too easily ignored, because it interferes with the enjoyment of an image.

Meanwhile a photo still carries a segment (or burden) of objective truth that is unnerving and makes photography unlike any other art.

The photo's silence, moreover, gives the image a deceptively stern, grave quality, as if it offered a clear view "beyond the noise".

Each picture sucks you in, makes demands on your emotions. A little vacuum that can leave you drained if you're not careful.

Published pictures have so much authority that they seem to have the final word on the way something should be viewed.. (I think that's what many photographers secretly love about photographs  -  the authority of the published image.)

Once published, images can seem like the assertion of an unassailable objective wholeness.

Writing is made of components, words, and can be broken down or rewired. Pictures, meanwhile, cannot be - they supposedly just convey the captive instant. "Don't shoot the messenger!" each one squeaks when confronted.
.

If Sharia law were imposed tomorrow and all images were banned, would a wonderful freedom from a degrading tyranny of archetypes and stereotypes not emerge?

To my mind anything of any importance that exists is outside the realms of the visible. The visible is only (and not always to the same degree) a manifestation or effect of what is important and invisible.

Photography helps place far too much emphasis on the visible symptoms, as if they functioned in lockstep with the invisible causes, which is rarely the case.

When, as a culture, photography makes us become fixated with the symptoms as if they were an accurate evocation of the causes and we start to think that what has no visible symptom has less importance than what does, we reach a point where we no longer understand the world so well.

Nice observations from Nicolas Bouvier

Le monde est constamment poliphonique, alors que nous en avons, par carence ou par paresse, qu'une lecture monodique. il y a des moments... ou tout d'un coup on percoit toutes ces harmoniques. C'est a dire qu'on entend toutes les voix de la partition au lieu d'en entendre qu'une, comme a l'accoutumee, parce qu'on vit dans un temps lineaire, qu'on a un passe, un avenir, on fait des projets, ce qui distrait de l'instant present

... le haiku est, philosophiquement, l'oppose et l'antidote du projet....

Au Japon et en Asie jaune, les gens ne surveillent pas leur visage comme nous le faisons chez nous. Peut etre a cause du bouddhisme, ils n'attachent pas tellement d'importance a leur personne. De telle sorte que lorsque vous les photogrqphiez ils vous donnent leur existence, leur "instant d'existence" avec beaucoup de candeur et sans du tout prejuger de son contenu. Tandis qu'en occident, le visage est l'enseigne, le menu ou la carte du restaurant. C'est a dire qu'on concentre dans la tete jusqu'a la congestionner, tout un projet social. La personne, le citoyen,le seducteur ou la sedctrice, l'ariste maudit ou pathtique que l'on souhaiterait etre. Le visage est a la fois le cahier des pretentions et des reclamations, et la concentration de ce projet cree un cesure dans le corps, qu'on laisse muet silencieux, dont on ne s'occupe pas, qu'on laisse aller n'importe comment. Le personnage est davantage d'un jet.... Si vous voulez il y a une meilleure repartition de l'etre, telle que la camera peut le fixer.

What has value and what doesn't

Fascinating film about how MW took on the whole Economics establishment and showed that by excluding from calculation all the unpaid work done, mainly by women, the picture one gets of a nation's economy is entirely distorted.

The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life by Charles Derber

" Many people see nothing egoistic about everyday conversation. We're nice and civilized people, after all, and we revel in shooting linguistically charged sound waves at each other. Some of us never stop talking, we love it so much. Certainly we're just making innocent and polite chatter? For example, one person in a group mentions their new puppy, everyone swoons, and another person responds "when my dog was a puppy I had the worst time keeping him out of the basement." Yet another person responds, "we'd like to get a puppy but our condo association doesn't allow them." The initial speaker then says "we named him 'Fred'" and someone else adds "I've always wanted a dog named Boethius, but my husband doesn't like that name." Was that exchange just a smattering of idle small talk? A mere chewing of the air? On the surface, yes, but the whiplash revelations of "The Pursuit of Attention" add a shocking dimension to what most of us consider quotidian jibber jabber. "


As summed up by an Amazon reviewer.

I find those kind of conversations absolutely infuriating, unless they're with a 10 year old.


http://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Attention-Power-Everyday-Life/dp/0195135490/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Dixit Abraham Lincoln

    

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Two solutions to one problem

Compared to what?

Lets imagine you have, say, a 4 x 8 grid and if you fill in all the boxes in the grid you have genuine participatory democracy where every adult plays an active and continuous role in deciding what happens within their country on a local, regional and national level. 

I would say that most ordinary democracies would be able to fill in a couple of those squares at best, with the rest empty. People generally vote perhaps once every four years. This is the extent of their participation in democracy. 

The rest of the time they complain about the state of their country and their leader - a much vaunted benefit of not living in a country where the number of boxes filled is a fraction of a single one.

When looking at democracy in the world it is common to look at the amount of democracy in undemocratic countries as a proportion of the amount of democracy in democratic countries so that from that perspective it becomes impossible for the democratic country not to seem ideal!

If you however place the level of democracy that exists in a democratic country and that in an undemocratic country against a backdrop of genuine participatory democracy, you start to get a completely different picture: the numbers in the two types of country are far far closer to each other than they are to the total possible number. The emphasis shifts from the difference between them to the fact that both fall very short. 

This reframing may seem simple but is important because had it been the standard way of seeing things, it could have denied the impetus for some of the horrors of the past decade.

Very imperfect democracies become almost ideal democracies in the absence of a 3rd scale - which is terrible for the evolution of democracy.

We all need to start thinking much more about that 3rd scale. 

Contrast with Holland

I heard the exact same anecdote twice from two different people. Thought I was having a deja-vu earlier.

You can't just drop into someone's house, you need to be invited. Also they might give you a cup of tea or maybe nothing, but they'll never feed you. In Russia they'll empty out the contents of the fridge and lay it all out infront of you.

Is it just habits or can wealth have a bizarre de-civilising effect?

Alexandra had a friend who came round and brought her own salad, ate half of it and then wrapped it up and left.

People in the street look bland compared to Russia where each person's character is much better defined. What is important is that they work well and make a good living. Any internal development is seen as being of marginal importance.

Men and women

Any person spending time in Russia will not fail to notice the curious fact that the country is in fact largely run by women.

There seems to be an imbalance between the sexes. Men are spoilt, very free, often weak-willed and live within a world created by women. This is not about individual personalities, it is not about some women having a powerful character that crushes the man (that's something different), it is simply that the female will collectively is stronger and envelops totally. Like the mother figure that contains all the remaining ones, including the father, in the Russian doll depicted above.

The special complicity one seems to find amongst women has the smooth coherence of a woven rug and covers most of the country. Male bonds, meanwhile are a more rag-tag affair, whose power is compromised from the outset by the very thing that helps cement it - massive booze consumption.

It may have always been a bit like that. It's hard to really say. De Custine in the 1830s mentions that women could be relied on to deal with money matters with the utmost probity, while less was to be expected from men. From what I can make out WW2 exacerbated a preexisting tendency. When men came home from the war they were exhausted, traumatised and greatly reduced in numbers. Women during that time had been working hard and conscientiously, developing ttheir collaborative approach to life in the absence of men, and when the men came back from the front, women spoilt them rotten, indulging their every whim. Thus it became something of a habit amongst men that was passed on to subsequent generations.

I think also Communism had  had a belittling effect on males as individuals, made their personal efforts seem pitiful,  while for women Communism was perhaps a more positive environment as it protected and met basic needs. Under the stewardship of consumerism the sisterhood has received something of a mauling. There has been nothing like "compete" and "compare" to shred its subtle bonds. The machinery of turning people into consumers is only beginning to gather pace.

Doomsayers, historians and foreign observers seem to miss in their dismal analysis of Russia the marked contrast between the public and the personal spheres, where one sphere has a tendency to be a world of men and the other a world of women. People looking at Russia from the outside, and thus seeing predominantly the public sphere, cast a disparaging eye on the world of men: conniving, chaotic, doggedly inventive, lazy and, despite being interspersed with flashes of incredible courage or brilliance - often useless.

But the mistake is to see one side and mistake it for the whole. In the world of women there is an entirely different atmosphere: it is imbued with a strong sense of responsibility. Go into any space that is controlled by women, be it a room in an office, a home or a public space, and there is a heightened feeling of calm, order and serenity the likes of which you rarely see in other countries. There is not only a sense of safety and reassurance but a sense of collective intelligence, of know-how and complicity. The public sphere may seem brutal and bordering on inhuman, but the woman's sphere underpins all this. The severe and jarring outside world is one people step out into, it is not the world in which children are raised, in which old people end their days and men stumble back into at night. The West in fact mostly lacks this cushioned layer beneath the surface.

That Russia is a place of extremes is abundantly illustrated by this dichotomy. If one were to add the often negative aspects of external life to the more positive aspects of the private sphere, I wonder if the sum would be much lesser than the same sum made in countries more accommodating to the statistician.

I wonder how the bleak view of Russian history would be adjusted if we gave more weight and emphasis to the woman's side of life. But the poles are likely to narrow: commercialism is not only likely to break up the power of women by making them more competitive and self-centred but men will become more outwardly slick and less erratic by trying to live up to western conventions and also be reined in by what really formats the behaviour of Westerners - the discipline required to pay for credit card bills, mortgages etc.

A French guy once said to me something to the effect that Russian womanhood was like a skilfully made rug from which men fired themselves off like little rockets, tracing different arcs in the sky, sometimes sumptuous, but often with the feeble trajectory of a firecracker - a brief erratic fizzle, forced down by the imperturbable laws of gravity that each tries in vain to defy. Perhaps this ill-considered audacity is aided by the certainty of a soft landing.

Image issues

I get infuriated by people who dismiss Islam and am often amazed by how distorted views about Islamic culture and religion persist. Sometimes I ponder on the possible causes...

Maybe it has something to do with this:

Our mind works with images far more than we care to admit, especially when it comes to things that are distant from our ordinary lives. Islamic cultures don't really produce much images or imagery. Most of the images or imagery concerning the Muslim world are created by us. We tell their visual story almost entirely. In a way they are mute while our screaming and jeering can be heard across the world.

Moral map of the Middle East

Adjust your compass. If you think the captions make it hard to work out which place lies beneath it, you're right.

Evolution

To understand where we're headed, its a waste of time looking at economics, news, history and architecture and the deeds of important people.

The only ones that have the real understanding of what makes society tick are the Marketing, PR, Advertising peeps. But their power lies in not divesting this knowledge and their contempt for the fools that unwittingly do their bidding is tempered only by their astounding ability to deceive themselves.

Journalists and economists, the ones who formulate the "consensus reality" - offer little in the way of help. The first are in the pocket of the lot above and the economist is lost outside the realms of the measurable.

Here's a perfect example of how Economics is so backward, hamstrung by the ideological framework of the Standard Model:

in 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton and Amos Tversky of Stanford published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," a breakthrough paper on how people handle uncertain rewards and risks. In the ensuing decades, it became one of the most widely cited papers in economics. The authors argued that the ways in which alternatives are framed - not simply their relative value - heavily influence the decisions people make. This was a seminal paper in behavioral economics; its rigorous equations pierced a core assumption of the standard model-that the actual value of alternatives was all that mattered, not the mode of their presentation ("framing").

To me this illustrates how painfully slow and backwards Economic thinking is and how shifting its crude paradigms takes an eternity. Discoveries made long ago in other spheres become revelations to economists, once encased in the pseudo-scientific language and methodologies familiar to them.

Meanwhile, if you pick up Edward Bernays' Propaganda - a little tome first published in 1928 - that lays out the basic strategies of PR in a clear and concise fashion, you will see how very little has changed over the last hundred years in the West. Despite all the developments in fashions and appliances - it has been business as usual with little but an ever-evolving narrative masking a stagnancy, perhaps even a regression in people's consciousness.

The concept of evolution is very misleading. Most people seem to take it for granted that we are naturally evolving in the right direction. Possibly this is true on a scale of 100s of thousands of years. But certainly within the last 2000 years one should be very weary of seeing any evolution in mankind. All that has evolved is man's dependency on various systems. On the whole, as a being increasingly dependent on huge indifferent hierarchies, he is not necessarily evolving in the right direction. Furthermore, division of labour, one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model, has created millions of "fachidioten": people who can only look beyond the little corner of the vast, terrible hierarchy known as the 'free market' quite timidly (since their consciousness is so tied to it) and who only have in common with other men what is handed down to them by the peeps mentioned towards the beginning of this piece.

Economism

Economism is a moral and social posture "which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth".

It's incredibly pervasive. As the evening winds down, to show how clever they are, someone will invariably flare their nostrils, put on a solemn face and start going all macro. Within a few minutes the whole table is infected, carping on about national debt, budget cuts and currency fluctuation. Hopefully one day it will be recognised as a mental illness and there'll be a 10 step programme to wean people off it.

"Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored of its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer."

Albert Jay Nock

I'd say that sums it up perfectly and the "despairingly consenting" bit is upon us now! It is hardly suprising that economism creates such a world since in essence, it systematically elevates the nastiest most ruthless people possible, those cunning enough to know how to observe the letter of the law whilst having total disdain for the spirit of it. It forces us all to develop that most horrible side of ourselves unless we`re already taking protection under the umbrella of others who individually or collectively fit that description. 

Missing ingredients

The missing ingredients are often acknowledged.

Dijon

Stockholm

Basel

Geneva

Nizhny Novgorod

The purple fence

At the edge of the village an izba stood out because it had been modernised. It had plastic windows and an ideal-fence-like purple fence around it.

I mentioned the purple fence to my friend Andrei and he smirked. It seemed we both had the same attitude to it. But I found out later it meant quite different things to each of us.

For me it represented the first symptom of a kind of breakdown, of a state where people start to look at each other and compare, and decide they want to be different and show it. To express their difference.

It’s also the first step up in the hierarchy of objects. This hierarchy is like a bizarre pyramid where value is ascribed to objects not because of their ability to perform a function or because of their quality but because of their associations with what is seen as an ideal lifestyle. At the bottom of this pyramid lies the purely functional and the improvised. Those who’s mind is tuned to the hierarchy of objects feel repulsed when they see objects designated for certain functions being used for others. In the hierarchy of objects newness is preferable to oldness. New you can be proud of, old, ashamed of.

The shapes, colours etc of these products correspond to an ideal, but it is a temporary one: conceived by people in an office half way around the world, and will soon be replaced by another, rather than being the result of a native ergonomy. The quality is not great and, for reasons of economies of scale, there always needs to be a tendency towards homogeneity. So that purple fence is a member of a family of purple fences from around the world instead of having any relation to the place where it is planted.

To me the owner has been co-opted, lifted out of the mindset that surrounds them and out of a mindset that responds positively to what surrounds them and become a member of all the purple fence-minded people everywhere who are in fact responding defensively to what surrounds them.

From my point of view, through the owner of the fence, the forces of mediocrity had encroached in this most traditional of places. The reasoning once had been “how do I make this well and make it last?” and now it is “why don’t I try this because it will demonstrate what I aspire to be”.

Anyway there’s something about the purple fence that’s incompatible with just being natural and sitting having a neighbourly chat. You can’t imagine the owner of the purple fence doing that. She was a stout blonde in early middle age who, I learnt, looked down on the others in the village, but was happy to invite them over for drinks and nibbles to reinforce her status amongst them. She'd clearly staked her differences into the ground. They couldn't be momentarily cast aside.

During my stay in the village it was with thoughts like that that I filled the void caused by not understanding much of what anyone was saying.

For Andrei it was something different. The purple fence was just an accident of chance: like what happens when you develop a photograph and through the magnifying glass you see that a few of the pixels are completely the wrong colour. If you take a big enough cross-section of people, there’s no reason, just aberrations happen. Some people have bad taste.

Seeing freedom differently

The effect of the mortgage crisis has been to expose a distorted interpretation of freedom upheld by powerful dogma.

A dogma insists that matters are far too complicated for you to grasp and your only responsibility, to prevent chaos, is to surrender personal judgement. "Serve x with all your might and all will be for the best" is its principal demand.  This time x was the Economy , while in the past it's been the Pope (papal infallibility), the King (divine right) etc. 

When everything appears to be headed in the right direction, the effect on people's minds is total. The dogma seems to cover everything, like the sky. Until suddenly, what was thought to be the sky turns out to be just a painted décor, a trompe l'oeuil. A small crack and the illusion shatters. Through this crack we're seeing hints of a much wider more unpredictable sky. The new air rushing through feels very different to the clammy air of certainty we breathed before.

There's a gradual realisation that the axioms setting the direction in which society moves are not immutable, that there are many other possibilities - that the economy itself is not the measure of all things. It is remarkable how critics of faith often seem to miss the major and most problematic one: the faith in the Invisible Hand - now long hard-coded in our social behaviour.

The problem is more profound even than the "do as thy wilt" (the thought that some kind of common good emerges from the sum of all selfish actions) embedded in the Faith. The very idea that the world is composed of separate individual minds making rational choices is fundamentally flawed and upon it the whole sorry edifice of economics is based.

“We interpret a dependence, in our civilisation, upon economic competition, as proof that this is the prime motivation that human nature can rely upon”. Ruth Benedict

One of the Faith's most nefarious offshoots has been to make an idol of the values of competition. This has created a raft of ills we are now going to be spending the next century divesting ourselves of. Deeply embedded social Darwinism, the notion of 'just deserts' in the distrubution of wealth, reductive thinking invading every sphere of life, even the most intimate, the obsession with growth rather than finding a balance, the tacit acceptance that creating a "necessary stupidity" in society is worth it because it's good for business, the redemptive power of money and therefore the ends justifying the means in any way that's not overtly criminal (i.e. lack of responsibility) - creating terrible lesions in the body of society.

What we have taken for freedom is an efficient organisational framework that provides opportunities for acquiring wealth. A kind of vast opportunity machine. It gives certain people a measure of freedom by virtue of allowing them to exist within this framework in more favourable terms than others.

There may be some freedom in all this, but not quite in the way we imagine. We imagine there’s a much fuller freedom, at least just round the corner. But as awareness of the millions serving at the lower rims of the vast pyramid increases, when the correlation between one person’s freedom and another having less becomes clearer - then it all becomes less appealing.

So much depended on an "aversion of the gaze" that may have been maintained were it not for the combined effects of the banking crisis, the growth of the Web and ecological movements, making it unavoidable to dwell on the interconnectedness of things.

Limits of photography

Every art has its limits. It's easy to forget that when an artform is as seductive and predominant in daily life as photography.
Something about it lowers our guard: enticed, we forget how the surface of things can be deceitful.

Imagine the faces of people at a classical music concert. Serious, impassive. Inside each person there's so much going on but none of it is visible on the surface. Much of reality is happening at a level not visible on the surface of things. When we peer into the world through photos every day, we forget this.

Images are silent and cunning if one does not take into account their limitations. Photographers themselves would do well to keep reminding us what they are.

Cynicism

The cynic thinks he has seen through something. So he sniggers and in so doing feels warm inside and at one with other sniggerers. In reality he has not seen far enough. Cynicism is a sort of surrender.

Era of personal responsibility

The web could lead to less government, less politics, less corporate control and usher in a new era of freedom and personal responsibility.

There's a growing realisation that people are able to self-organise without leadership (something inconcievable a few years ago!) and create powerful waves of ad-hoc consensus to tackle concrete problems without politics or ideology to provide the impetus.

The terribly destructive big guiding ideas and solutions for humanity, -isms etc that raged through the last 2 centuries could start to disolve and give way to far more practical, common sense approaches at very local right up to global levels.

There is an opportunity to collectively regain control over much of what is handled by intermediaries who are locked (perhaps quite naturally) in a dynamic of forever increasing their grip on us. Over the decades they have stripped society of self-reliance and created huge structures of dependency, whether government or corporate.

Through the web we can increasingly both make "small government" a reality and restrict the entaglement of corporations in all aspects of our lives by bypassing alot of what they offer. The result could start to look a lot more like freedom than anything Western society has seen in a long time.

Less government means less taxes and bureaucracy and less corporate intervention means a better quality of life and a more balanced more local economy, with more inventiveness and resourcefulness. In sum, less of the tedious uniformity and manipulation that characterises the output of both sides who are notionally pitted against each other in false opposition.

This practical apolitical way forward would also hopefully finally kill off the outdated concepts of left and right, this other absurd dialectic that to this day continues to paralyse the political imagination.

The idea that people in large modern societies could finally, to a far greater extent, be able to collectivedly assume responsibilities and take charge of their own destiny unmediated is tremendously exciting. Of course it creates the problem of a new dependency - on the internet itself. That malfunctions, or becomes too controlled and it ruins everything. If the internet is the only means for this to be conducted, it will get hijacked. There is no sinecure. Most people in the world have no internet access and its hardly desirable that the precondition for being an active citizen is being connected to the internet. It is more a question of the internet enabling new structures of organisation and disintermediation that can evolve in the real world after incubation, as it were, on the web.

Electorates feel a powerful sense of entitlement coupled with effective powerlessness, two contradictory forces that tend to keep people locked in a permanent state of indignation and makes democracy seem absurd. This may disolve when there is no longer anyone for people to point a finger at but themselves - a new era of personal responsibility.

Follow the link before to get a sense of the steps being taken in this direction: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/gov-20-week-in-review-1.html?

update 15.05.10: saw this today - and amazed by how it echoes the ideas in this piece!
"perhaps the next political movement is a practical rather than an ideological one"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/may/12/ethical-living-real-big-society-two?

Ways of seeing

You cannot make the same deductions from what you see in images of Russia as you might from images taken in the West.

To Western eyes decaying surfaces often mean degradation and smooth renovated surfaces are a sign of confidence and well-being. Colours, symmetry, state of repair to us are important indicators of people's internal condition.

Conversely, an object's distance from an ideal of completion can be unsettling and sometimes shameful.

Here these things often matter less. There's a more detached, utilitarian approach, a different relationship to the material world. Not the same urgency for things to conform to an ideal.

In Russia men often mix dark or muted colours with relatively little attention to personal grooming or awareness of the image they project. The absence of a ready smile or desire to use external appearance as a channel for "personality" seems to outsiders like an abandonment of self respect that can only be equated with depression and resignation.

There's a tendency in the West to "put all one's attributes to the front of the store", to burden ourselves (and consequently others) with our aspirations, to identify with what we own, which one now finds in ludicrously parodied form in Moscow but is not a characteristic of people in Russia.

There's still a tradition here of giving away little publicly, of not externalising things unless in trusted company. It's still very much about human relations and personal character rather than extensions here, which is hard to capture in an image.

In Russia you take away someone's extensions (house, car, furniture etc) they still remain roughly themselves (except they might be a little pissed off!), in the West you remove the extensions and in quite a profound sense, you have an entirely different person than before.

As people here gradually become more taken over by their extensions and in some cases, like in the West, become little more than the sum of these, what seems like a gain is in fact an immeasurable loss. But there is no place for acknowledging that in the way of seeing that dominates today's world - with its undue emphasis on the visible, the measurable and a hierarchy of things.

More "inspiring", less "witnessing"

In photojournalism it's perhaps the business of "witnessing" stuff who's time is up. This is no longer enough - it now implies a certain passiveness and arrogance - as if the photographer was an angel peering into humanity, governed by different laws.

Images conceived to shock viewers out of their complacency seem now to have the opposite effect: they only add to the general sense of jadedness and helplessness people feel about events in the broader world.

Aestheticised horror pushes the subject matter out far beyond the point where "us" becomes "them" and empathy, overstretched, recoils.

(sorry, I can't bring myself to increase the size of the above James Nachtwey picture)

Subtler, softer stories are emerging that try to bring their subject-matter closer to viewers. By focusing more on commonalities than stark differences, by including the poetry and uniqueness of life in a certain place, they show "life elsewhere" as being not so fundamentally, irreparably different to life closer by.

We are at the awkward, early beginnings of exploring many new registers in storytelling with images. People in Western countries have developed a terribly warped sense of the broader world, and photographers have a large burden of blame for that. They are doing well to start showing it in all its shades and complexities. Rather than adopting a stern objective stance with its implied omniscience, they are less afraid to put more of themselves into the equation and to try to inspire, instead aiming to force a single, violent response to what they have witnessed.

Keeping it real

"He had the unlucky capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in life. Every sphere of activity was, in his eyes, linked with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, he always found himself repulsed by this knavery and falsehood which blocked every path of action. Yet he had to live and find himself an occupation."
Tolstoy, War and Peace (about Pierre Bezuhov)

Looking ahead

Thanks to the web and greater awareness of the scarcity of resources, the hierarchy of value based around modernity, where the most modern is seen as the best and conversely the least modern (generally I'm referring to ways rather than objects) is seen as the worse will lose its appeal. This will add up to quite a major shift. The prestige of sustainability will appear instead, one where respect is given to ingenious and efficient ways of doing things.

Many cultures are great repositories of such ingenuity, but despite the efforts of tiny minority, the vast majority see non-Western as being mainly backward, since they are unconciously programmed to see a system as faulty unless it generates profit for someone. Modernity will be relegated to being more instrumental than a matter of prestige. The elite of each country will start to try to outdo each other in appreciating once again what's left of their own cultures which until recently they had nothing but contempt for.

From Marcus Aurelius

"Don't just take your breath from the surrounding air, but take your thought too from the mind that embraces all things. The power of mind spreads everywhere and permeates no less than the air. It is there for all who want to absorb it just like the air for those who can draw breath."

I wonder what he meant by that?

Thought of the day...

It’s usual to look into the past to try to understand where we are today. We tease out episodes and give them special significance. Together they build up a narrative that explains why things came to be the way they are. But the past can be treacherous and mirror-like, both entrancing and paralyzing: by the time we've worked out what today means it’s already tomorrow and we need to start again, so we’re always one step behind. It may be healthier to accept the present as much as possible and spend more time examining instead the dream or dreams that guide us - where they come from, where they lead to - to try to identify the invisible vector lines we advance along.

Nice idea

Developing into what, exactly?

(not my words)

We have been focusing our energy and resources on trying to solve our Third World problems to become more like the First World. But perhaps it is time that we, the so called Third World minds, focused our energy and creativity on solving some of the First World problems. We will have a brighter future to look forward to, and perhaps this can help us rethink and approach our current problems from a different perspective.

http://designforthefirstworld.com/

update 15.05.10: here's another more arty version of the same concept:
http://ghanathinktank.org/

Drawing

The moment they realised they were wrong

2008 Gouache

A few more drawings

The are all at the centre of their own universes

2009 Pen and paper

This is their heart, this is their brain

2008 pencil and biro

F for fun, give me some

2008 gouache and pen

First impressions of Sicily when coming from Russia

You arrive in Palermo and the first thing you notice on the road are the huge billboards with close-up faces of people in sunglasses or those popular stylised ensemble shots (above). Everyone absolutely implaccable. Then there is a chaos of white and cement-coloured houses clinging to the hillsides. The town slopes peacefully onto a bay and there are areas with street colour and life that I remember in many places in Europe when I was young but have since mysteriously disappeared. Mobile fish sellers in tiny vans on street corners. Street stalls that double up as restaurants etc.  People are always rather elegant and there seems to be a secret know-how in the social DNA of how to make everything light and a pleasure.

But there’s a darker side – the dream. It affects a significant proportion of the population who, dressed in impossible dark clothes, achieve a look that seems copied in every detail from billboards and glossy scented magazines. Like someone preparing a speech or storing up jokes for later use – it's as if it had been practiced and practiced before being brought into the open. 

The look unravels itself before the eyes of the spectators and they gradually take in the breathtaking detail and application that lies behind it. They absorb the subtle ways in which aggression has been formalised by an almost turned-up collar and how ruggedness and disenchantment have been aestheticised to the point of seeming grandiose through the elaborate stitching on a vast fragrant black leather jacket. This might be accessorised with a belt that hangs with exquisitely studied insouciance – making passing references to Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Sid Vicious, with a nod to Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Then only a James Dean-like sultriness can possibly do – too many words could distort this tableau.

There are policemen and security guards who look like they have the most intimate, almost mystical relationship with their mirrors. The dream looms over their heads and the lifestyle that comes with it always seems somehow tantalisingly within reach. It's not a simple question of buying stuff or copying stuff, but a far deeper process. The look is not merely a set of things but a stance, an approach to life, a way of refracting the surroundings, of holding one’s self and finally of just being that will provoke such admiration in others that once you have it, you can glide through the world suspended in adulation – building on it every day until you reach the point where everything you do has an unmatchable authority and releases from others not just grudging assent but open-hearted gratitude.

Everyone smiles with warm soft eyes that seem to hold few other anxieties.

World map by seconds of US TV news coverage, feb 2007

What matters because it's known to matter = what is real ? In many senses yes, surely? There's an expression to describe this: "consensus reality" which people are using now. At least I think so because I read it in the Huffington Post.

Ok, the image above represents network news only and not citizen journalism, blogs and everything else that's emergent now. But it nonetheless represents the norm in the sense that one person communicating with another in America probably has to use this kind of world view as a reference point. This is the common ground as it were - and it's not pretty...

Let's put it to the vote!

I saw this call for a debate on a website and it reminded me of the English love of concensus, which inspired a little skit...

In the voice of comedian John Fortune:

"Well of course all three were dreadful. But we still haven't worked out which one was worse, so its important we should have a debate to clear that up. Once we've got that done, we can move on and get on with other stuff. So the best way, I think, to settle this is to have a range of experts stand up and argue whichever position they feel most strongly about. We'll then let the audience decide who's argued their point more convincingly by having a show of hands at the end. Whoever gets the most votes - wins. And then we'll know. 

But it'll be no easy contest. Of course Hitler is the classic one and in many ways you can't get worse than that. But we now know that Stalin killed far more people and was around for a lot longer, so I'd say there'll be alot of people backing him over Hitler for the top spot. But then you'll get those who'll be wanting to put Mao up there because really, he was a very nasty piece of work and the Chinese aren't properly owning up to it. 

In any case it's not really about who's worse than the other, because they were all completely rotten, but it's important not to forget that. Certainly if you were to take all 3 and put them on one side and then take, say, us and put us on the other side, then there'd really be no contest. Of course we're not perfect, nobody ever said that. But it's important to remember that fundamentally, we're pretty fair and decent and alot of people are forgetting that these days. So its good to have these debates because they do remind us that when it comes to feeling good about ourselves we really have no more reliable, more solid and more unshakeable partners than Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Especially Hitler, without whom we would certainly never have Won the War. 

I mean, after both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein kind of fizzled out, we know that these chaps can really be counted on in our hour of need. Of course there's the fact that they've been dead a while, but that doesn't mean we can't keep them alive for a little longer. Anyway, after that we can find out who was the greatest leader of the 20th century, Churchill or Thatcher, or tackle the thorny issue of who was responsible for the collapse of British naval power after World War 2."

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

This one is from a Ted talk and many will probably have seen it already and yes, I did kind of find it inspiring, so here it is.

"When we reject the single story, when we realise there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise."

The consequences of the single story to my mind are capital flight, a condescending outlook towards one's own culture and traditions, a reluctance to believe and invest in these, (food yes, dress, on occasion, the rest, please) - and an inclination to shop at Harrods.

The enduring image

Cottage in Northern Iran

Our mind works with images. Images today are the primary means of understanding the world. Text, or even speech seem mediated, subjective and drawn out. The impact of an image is immediate. We feel free to draw the conclusions we want and easily forget the photographer and photo editor are no less selective than the author.  A photograph can provoke a sense of familiarity and intimacy with the subject matter that only personal experience can contend with. As Susan Sontag remarked “Photography makes us feel the world is more available than it really is.”

Photography is dangerously beholden to the external attributes of its subject matter. In comparison, other visual arts (even film) and text seem so much freer to convey the spectrum of human experience without being anchored to a given time or place. This is why a special trust is accorded to photography which will, for its part, tend to rest again and again on the surface of things...

Yet we feel we have penetrated beyond that. It's true we have developed a tremendous skill in decoding, drawing conslusions from what we see "in" the photo. We can often date, place, understand the purpose and symbolism, classify the genre and gage the impact on others.

But decoding is not penetrating and suggesting isn't saying. Outside the poetics of mood and the suggestiveness of symbols, there's something distinctly slippery and seductive about photography. It is more photography that penetrates us than the other way round. Our resistance has gradually been worn down and we have given photographs the authority to act as a substitute for real experience.

For the instant emotional kick, the power of dislocation to another bright set of possibilities, nothing can beat it.

Our impression of a place we have not focused much attention on but just know of vaguely can often be no more than the sum of the photographs we have seen of it. If we’ve seen just a few photos or a certain type of photo – these will carry enormous weight in forming our outlook. One or two extra photos can tip the balance and create an entirely new one. When I try to examine carefully what my impression is of say Laos, South Korea or any place I know relatively little about, its alarming to sense how artificial it is.

It seems the frail rims of our knowledge are cluttered with such fanciful borrowed imagery, little photographic placeholders marking the existence of uncharted territory that is often accepted as the territory itself!

At their best images are a kind of interface, a way of managing our most visceral, emotional understanding of the world, otherwise they are a screen, that conceals reality whilst posing far too convincingly as a representation of it.

We live in 2 principal modes today, active mode and spectator mode and spend for too much of our time in the latter, interested in the surface of things or interacting with reality with a complacency fashioned by the spactator mode. This means a passive, expectant, entitled disposition. Engagement is optional and there's a cool, contextualised, category-filled way of perceiving things, that shrinks from the violence of uniqueness.

The special trust accorded to photography combined with its pervasiveness has a cumulative effect, that of upholding a fear of the world. Clearly the excellent war reporters and those who document catastrophes cannot be blamed for the invasion of their images on our consciousness. But the mass of images creates a pyramid-like hierarchy of place. Surveying the world from our mind's eye - as we move away from the familiar big city apexes of 'civilisation' - the world according to images gets nastier, hungrier, more dishevelled and disaster prone and we feel grateful for the comfort and security of our sofa. The avowed purpose of images to bring the world closer is reversed, and the final result is back to the old chestnut: US and THEM. I wonder how much these reporters, seeing the result, feel any sense of responsibility for reinforcing a polarised view of a world that doesn't exist and have a desire to correct this somehow. As we move, hopefully, into a new era of personal responsibility, this may happen.

Images have as much distorted the world as they have revealed it to us. So the cure for the distortions of perception created by images is - more images! One can start to see a scenario where new generations of images correct the harm done by the previous generation and so on ad infinitum. As people begin to think more strategically about the consequences of their actions and appreciate the interconnectedness of things, image producers and publishers too might follow suit. I wonder also what people do to keep a corner of the mind free from the image's enduring power to validate or co-opt personal experience.

We need Russia!

The negative view of Russia is partly a product of the universality we have given Western culture, which leads to the conclusion that other cultures are aberrations or somehow handicapped by a faulty inner structure that may be remedied providing they take steps to resemble ours.

From this angle of view Russia seems like a grey version of Western Europe. A struggling, hobbling, left handed copy that only has itself to blame for its ills. Due to a lack of democracy, accountable institutions and the sloth of its demoralised people it stumbles around, cowered by terrible weather and a merciless corrupt state. Only through convincingly adopting Western institutions, know-how and organisation, can they ever be saved.

Amongst those most guilty of proliferating this viewpoint are journalists, who spend so much time together and with other expatriates, that they manage to live in an environment almost uncontaminated by the mindset of the country they are reporting about. The host country's perspective is handily contained in little epigrams and phrases that match the prejudices of their readers and the politics of their management. The voices of local people that echo the mindset with which the journalists arrive are employed to lend additional support to their own. The approach is predetermined and unlikely to suffer any modification.

The journalist's mindset will measure everything against Europe and America, the Norm, the place from where all civilized standards emerge. (And they do too. Wouldn't it be good if other parts of the world started to be more assertive about their own take on civilized standards - which they keep below the radar - instead of kow towing to those of others and waiting for HSBC to come along and do it for them.)

As readers, we will always tend to give journalists the benefit of the doubt from lack of other sources of information - unless they happen to dealing with a subject we have specialised knowledge of.

Russia is used by them as a "convenient other". The old habit of arranging facts about Russia to ultimately point to a negative conclusion is a generalised reflex. The state is bad, the people are to be pitied, they are huddled and defiant.

It has an important cathartic effect. At the mere mention of Russia, our own view of ourselves undergoes a sudden transformation: we see ourselves as rational, inventive, fair minded, democratic and a source of light and inspiration for the rest of the world. Next to Russia, the old hag Europe realises she’s “ultimately” a shining princess, and smiles modestly. It’s too good to be true! We need Russia!

Angles of view

At the heart of many misconceptions there often lies a semantic problem. Imagine if the United Kingdom was called "England" – and it contained not only England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but 80 further territories, many with distinct cultures, races, climates and modes of life, all connected in one landmass, across a surface area 100 times greater. Then you start to get a sense of the scale of the semantic problem!

Russia is a vast continent disguised by semantics as a mere country. Its size is hard for anyone to really grasp. But it's often seen to compensate for this by being relatively easy to conceptualise in terms of its variety. Even people in Moscow and St. Petersburg often think that outside the capitals there are no more than endless meaningless variations of essentially the same layout.

As with every country, the "story" - the one that is commonly told to everyone - floats over it like a haze. Certainly the story today appears to be one of sameness rather than variety. The official version of life (much like everywhere) is quite different to the way life really is. There seems to be no unified way of making sense of the change that's going on or any representation of the dozens of different native nationalities and languages, cultures, foods, religions etc. Russia is certainly one of the least understood places on earth and very rarely looked at with any degree of objectivity. This is primarily through a tremendous lack of information that begins in Russia itself. In a way this would not matter so much were it not for the fact that many people in Russia seem to have grown to believe the story told about them from abroad.

Here is a summary in my mind of these views of Russia: There's the 'lay of the land' - reminiscent of Saul Steinberg’s famous “view from 9th Avenue” (above). In this case stately Europe disappears into a grey haze roughly at the level where the Ukraine starts, (where a mental iron curtain seems to have drawn itself up), with a brief flash of gold domes and architectural frivolity at the level of Moscow and St Petersburg before losing itself again in endless steppe, despair, repetition and meaninglessness up to the Pacific ocean.

Its history is also seen from a similar vantage point: a grotesque procession of despots, the eternally suffering Russian populace as their plaything. The continual swell of hubris on a scale unknown anywhere else. A place where grandiose efforts to emulate Western ways and to advance technologically have simply laid bare a fundamental barbarism and disregard for human life or dignity. In the cannon of Western literature on the subject of Russia some very talented authors have paid particular attention to these aspects with the consequence of belittling much else about the country.

There's the politically aware view where the Russian government and particularly its leader, loom so large as to become of the same size and importance as 12% of the Earth's surface. Whatever happens in the latter is immediately tempered by indignation about the former. It has almost become a generalised emotional habit in the West to denigrate Russia's achievements with some acerbic, suspicious contextualisation. Question: What do people think about when they think of Egypt? Do they cleave away at their consciences and think of Hosni Mubarak? I don't think so. They tend to think about its climate, history and people and Mubarak is fairly small in comparison, if not invisible. People who think of America in terms only of it's head of state and his coterie generally realise they're being unfair on the country and its inhabitants. One really needs to question how it is that we've developed such reflexes when looking at Russia, such that at the mere mention of it, the state, like some large raptor, swings down and obscures the view of almost everything else.

The problem is not so much that too much is heard about the Russian state, it is rather that far too little is known about Russia itself. There might be more efforts not specifically to paint a positive portrait of Russia or gloss anything over but simply to provide a greater balance of information by focusing away from what is already known and examining things of equal importance that are less known.