"What the People Want..." Jacobson's Compassion Fatigue

In the much-needed discussion regarding the purpose and practical effectiveness of prisons in the UK comes Howard Jacobson's recent diatribe about "what the people want...". Writing in the Independent about the debate concerning the early release of Lockerbie bomber Megrahi, Jacobson opines that it appears as if everybody is being released from prison these days. In the face of apparent efforts to instantiate compassion within the modern penal system Jacobson believes that our brains must have shrunk, and claims, in a piece spotted with clumps of Shakespearean faux-gravitas, that he is suffering from compassion fatigue. Reading his pathetic reactionary musings one might be forgiven for thinking that he is suffering from chronic cognitive fatigue syndrome. I suspect with Jacobson it's fatal.

Beginning with the laziest sketching of Ken Clarke's recent reflections on the UK penal system as little more than 'a declared intention to let everybody out', Jacobsen, in moronic bible-black mode, rants on like a crazed post-apocalyptic Fox news presenter about the need for a return to harsh retributive justice, a ludicrous 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' mentality where notions of eternal damnation together with the ever-present classist stench of an 'us and them' ethos rule the day. His article, despite its malodorous Old Testament hyperbole, just comes over as the insubstantial ravings of an urban middle-class tosser who believes things like compassion, progressivism and enlightenment are mere lifestyle choices, equivalent to dabbling in the Kabbalah, Macrobiotics or Pilates, to be shed once one has become sufficiently jaded and fatigued by them. For the bloated reactionary compassion fatigue sits quite comfortably alongside a bored satiation with full-fat milk, sun-dried tomatoes and modern dance. His piece conjures up the image of Jacobson waking up in the morning, farting out the maladorous remains of the previous evening's dinner party, and saying to himself - 'Enough of these liberal enlightenment ideals, let's see how being a reactionary twat feels!'

Jacobson's moronic reflections on the nature of compassion attempt to accuse it of being gratuitous. But surely all compassion is gratitous...isn't it? Compassion, by its very nature, involves attitudes and actions which cannot be resolved to those either deserved or reasonably expected. Compassion cannot be reduced to suffient reason (despite the fact that Jacobson seems incapable of even the simplest acts of reason) - it is, and always has been, marked by a certin amount of gratuitous and non-instrumental excess. It arguably guards against a slide into the worst excesses of social instrumentalism and barabarism. Jacobson is either too stupid, jaded or fatigued to understand this; rather, in his article we are treated to the sort of ignorant invective we might expect from a dissapointed and embittered uncle who thankfully doesn't visit all that often. Consider the following:

'The trouble with prisons, Kenneth Clarke has been telling us, is that they make no difference; we no sooner let offenders out than they offend again. I propose a simple solution to that problem - keep them in. Where the original offence was serious, the slightest suggestion that they will repeat it should be sufficient to extend their stay. Until when? Doomsday, if necessary.'

or:

'Rehabilitation is a fine ideal, but it is secondary to our own problem.'

or:

'The first justification of the prison wall is that it separates us from those who will harm us if they can. The second is that it enables society to honour the retribution we individually crave but cannot individually exact.'

Now compare Jacobsen's remarks with what Ken Clarke actually said:

'As long as I can remember the political debate on law and order has been reduced to a competition over whether a government has spent more public money and locked up more people for longer than its predecessor...It now costs more to put someone in prison – £38,000 – than it does to send a boy to Eton...The consequence is that more and more offenders have been warehoused in outdated facilities and we spend vast amounts of public money on prison. But no proper thought has been given to whether this is really the best and most effective way of protecting the public against crime.'

Clarke argued that prison should continue to be the necessary punishment for many offenders, but questioned whether 'ever more prison for ever more offenders' always produces better results for the public. He observed that the record prison population and the crime rate in England and Wales are now among the highest in western Europe. Just locking people up without actively seeking to change them is 'what you would expect of Victorian England' and noted that reoffending rates among the 60,000 prisoners given short sentences has reached 60% and rising. He added:

'This does not surprise me. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And many of them end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families during their short time inside.'

In the midst of being struck with a terrible bout of enlightenment fatigue, Jacobson seems happy to woefully misrepresent Clarke's contributions to this vital debate and to wallow around in the insubstantial pigshit of his own jaded opinions. He does all of this while believing that he is 'speaking for the people', 'telling it like it is' and voicing 'what we all think'. This is a particular myopic middle-class craving with a long and patronising history associated with paternalism, ignorance and class hatred.

Jacobson closes his piece with feigned disbelief at a quote from a letter by the sister of one of the Lockerbie victims who had the temerity to wish the freed Megrahi 'well'. Jacobson's despicable attitude towards this sentiment is emblematic of his deep and malignant stupidity. For him this person's gratuitous and compassionate sentiment signals nothing less than a 'New Inferno' - 'where there is no underworld, no ascending circles of sinfulness, just a flattened plain of minor miscreants to whom we extend warm greetings.' No Howard...it is simple evidence that other 'people' are capable of not only conceiving of compasison but of actually acting with it without becoming bored, jaded or fatigued. Other people, Ken Clarke included, also seem to have the capacity for thinking about the penal system in ways that offer the possibility of individual rehabilitation, social cohesion and hope, a capacity you so obviously lack.

Kleist: New Website

Today we’re launching the website for our film Kleist. This film is a small collaborative project, and consists of a photo-roman documentary that tells the remarkable story of the mysterious disappearance of the German physicist Gustav Kleist. I have spent the last two years researching the life of the mysterious German physicist Gustav Kleist, collecting a sizeable archive of rare photographic images and recorded interviews with his wife detailing the mystery of his disappearance in 1942.

The Children are Guilty

In April 2009 in Edlington, South Yorkshire, two brothers aged 10 and 11 apparently lured two other boys,aged 9 and 10, into the woods where they subjected them to an abject catalogue of physical savagery and sexual sadism.

Watching the media coverage of their trial in recent days has laid bare the appalling cultural abjection to which we have all become subject. It is not the crimes themselves, which no one can deny are savage and appalling, but the utterly infantile and pathetic public, media, political and legal discourse around the case. These abstract and hysterical discourses all express a singular epistemology of ‘the children are guilty’. In 2010 in our seeming state of benign and complacent enlightenment we appear to be happy to asign absolute guilt and responsibility to two boys, aged 10 and 11. Surely this complacency screams of a massive collective failure to ‘think’ this event itself. I spent many hours watching a variety of media outlets report the boys’ trial, and read a great deal that was written at the same time. With only a few exceptions, such as Blake Morrison’s excellent piece (‘Let the Circus Begin’) that appeared in The Guardian at the time of the boys’ original arrest, the majority of the reporting and comment singularly failed to even think about the systemic ‘causes’ that led to such a terrible event. A single assumption has pervaded the discourse - ‘The Children are guilty’ – making it easy to condemn them as ‘evil bastards’ or ‘devil children’.

Evident from the discourse around the Edlington case, is an all too familiar failure to think about the unremmiting and abject ‘reality’ within which these events happened and will continue to happen…a failure to think at all. Can there be any more powerful spectacle of such a monumental failure in the capacity to ‘think’ than the trial itself. TV news and newspapers returned again and again to the pathetic spectacle, communicated through childish and badly executed pastel sketches of the two boys (aged 10 and 11) being brought to account for their crimes in front of the court.


Here the full assembly of the current judicial system confronted two isolated young boys (aged 10 and 11), alone with no parents or family present. No parents present. The spectral figures of parental failure (adults) apparently never having to account for themselves or their children (aged 10 and 11) before the ‘court’, and what’s more, it never really mattering since the only reality which matters to us is one where ‘the children are guilty’. As their mother articulated so brilliantly – ‘It’s got nowt to do with me!’ The accounts of their ‘toxic homelife’ are treated as familiar footnotes unconnected with the events that took place, just some kind of drab aesthetic backdrop to the real spectacle of their culpability, their guilt. It was reported again and again, with overwhelming cynical disdain, that when asked by police why they carried out the attack the boys had replied ‘because we were bored’. Why the cynical disdain? Do we not believe them when they say this? Are we so over-invested in the ‘interesting’ reality we have created,and into which these two children (aged 10 and 11) were forced to exist, that we simply cannot believe that a deep and catastrophic psychic death occurred to these children. A psychic death brought about by the sheer toxcity of their everyday reality that fundamentally undermined any connection whatsoever to the world. Is it not possible that a monumental boredom emerges from the most horrific developmental indifference and neglect, and this this leads to the most savage and nihilistic expression possible? Is it that to think in such a way undermines our almost mystic commitment to the axiom that ‘the children are guilty’?

The failure, by their parents and by us, to apparently be able to even begin to think about what these two boys (aged 10 and 11) did to two other boys (aged 9 and 10), and why they did it (with echoes of the 1993 Jamie Bulger case) is a truly nauseating spectacle.

Michael Haneke’s recent film The White Ribbon does seem to offer us some kind of a way of beginning to think about our failure to think through an event such as the one that occurred in Edlington. But it is an indirect and disturbing experience, often uncomfortable and deeply unsettling to watch.


Set on the eve of the First World War in 1913, and shot in black and white, the film is set in a north German village where a series of bizarre crimes and unexplained acts of violence (two of which are perpetrated against young children, and have clear echoes of the savagery evident in the Edlington case) are being committed. These senseless and savage acts may in fact be carried out by the children of the village, although the film never allows us to become certain of this. Haneke, in attempting to think these senseless acts uses an oblique approach whereby the children’s guilt is never actually assumed or established. This allows Haneke to do something quite remarkable and increasingly rare: to actually look and to think about what else is happening around the children. What is in fact happening to them is equal to, if not more horrific than, the ‘senseless’ acts of violence. It is all the more disturbing for the fact that what happens to them in their everyday lives supposedly has ‘sense’. What happens to them in this community has become so normal, so much part of the sterile homogeneity of accepted everyday reality that no one (no adult) really questions it. Systematic abuse and violence by adults towards children is endemic, the emotional neglect and indifference towards children by adults is rife, and the level of community endorsed repression is startling. The 'white ribbon' of the film’s title refers to the bands of shame that are tied round the arms of the pastor’s ‘naughty’ children who are subjected to his extreme physical and psychological discipline, and even (in the case of the village doctor’s daughter) sexual abuse.

Some critics have theorised that Haneke is attempting to explain the beginnings of fascism - that the generation of children who carry out these senseless and savage acts of cruelty on other children will grow up to be the generation that spawns the Nazis in Germany. But this seems to be a deeply mistaken understanding of the film; what the film is really about is the failures of the present. It is a film about our current failures with regard to our children, the failure to create a world that is not marked by absolutely endemic cruelty, indifference, greed, and stupidity. It is a film about the nihilism of the present. Haneke’s film is an attempt to re-engage the appalling moral complacency of present western societies that have become so sick and intellectually cretinous that we all easily accept a situation where we now have trials where we assign guilt to children (aged 10 and 11) where the fault almost certainly lies in their everyday lives, in the appalling reality we (adults) have created and go on reproducing, and into which our ‘guilty’ children are born.

Deleuze, Cinema and Belief: The Restoration of a Lost World

A podcast of my recent talk on Deleuze, Rossellini and the politics of belief is available here.

In this paper I argue that Cinema 2 can be read as a powerful manifesto advocating that what we ‘moderns’ need, existing as we do amidst the inhuman homogeneity of capitalist realism, is a renewed form of belief and hope in the world, and that it is modern cinema which has, and continues to, respond to this need. Deleuze asks whether we can go on living without hope and without a grasp on the situations in the world that surround us, and asks what it is that can replace the broken and nullified links of organic representation? For Deleuze the greatness of modern cinema, particularly Italian neorealism, lies in its capability to create other forms of agency and other forms of linkage to the world that are based on new forms of belief.

Capitalist Realism - Belief in the Possibility of a Different Reality

Review: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
By Mark Fisher



One might be tempted to assume that a book that so devastatingly diagnoses the abysmal conditions of the present would be heavily laden with nostalgic melancholy, perhaps full of bitter condemnatory memories about a different, better world that once was. However, you would be very wrong to make such an assumption. Fisher’s book is not at all a work of nostalgia or mourning for such a lost world, and probably shouldn’t even be described as simply just another piece of critical diagnosis. In short it is a rich, passionate, militant and wholly optimistic polemic that is all too aware of the excremental machine of capitalism that spreads its banal ontological coordinates across virtually every aspects of our daily lives, thoughts, desires, dreams, hopes and beliefs.

Fisher’s brilliant analysis of the critical psychopathology of the ontological homogeneity created by contemporary capitalism is not attended by the shadow of another world somehow lost in the past. The loss of reality that Fisher identifies in contemporary culture does not emerge from an explicit erosion of reality through time, rather, the loss is the terrifying result of the hyper-production, through capitalism, of one overwhelming and monopolising form of reality. Like beleaguered figures in Kafka’s literary work Fisher presents our own horrific ontological confinement within capitalism, often drawn from his own lived experience, where every aspect of our lives seem to have been reduced, banalised, consumed and excreted out onto serving plates at an infinite banquet with only with one injunction – consume more . The tedious festival of capitalist realism described by Fisher reminded me of the Duke in Pasolini’s Salo screaming ‘Mangia! Mangia!’at the victims during the notorious ‘shit’ banquet. Some of the most memorable passages in Fisher’s book concern forms of popular culture which revel in this circle of shit, work which merely reproduces the flat one-dimensional ontology of capitalist realism. The popular hegemony of much contemporary culture reduces the possibility of alternative forms of cultural resistance, shrinking it into an absolute invisible zero point. The world of capitalist realism is overwhelmingly ever-present, it is always there and presents itself as ‘natural’ and as the only reality; but what we lack is any hope for resisting the conditions of the present, for creating new possibilities of life, new realities, new ways of thinking and being. In the absence of such hope time itself has started to collapse. This, as Fisher convincingly argues, is the problem with capitalism realism – it is an ontological problem and it is a problem of belief. Fisher’s polemic precisely consists in attempting to revalorise a militant modality of belief as an alternative to the intolerable inevitability of capital. How can we, he asks, render the world livable and thinkable again without carelessly slipping into the quietude of nostalgia or abstracted zones of ineffective resistance? How do we move from the spectacle of resistance (the shit of capitalism) to truly effective modes of resistance? What would such resistance to the present consist of?

Fisher’s book goes beyond merely identifying the symptoms of our time, and moves into becoming one of the most exciting (albeit brief) and passionate cries for ontological resistance and the effort to create the conditions of possibility for an alternative to capitalist realism. Fisher, like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx and Deleuze, writes for ‘the people to come’, for an indeterminate future, in the belief that it is only by doing so that one can ever begin to truly alter the present. Only by breaking the banal cycle of replication of present being can the reality of that present be exposed as illusory and impoverished, as a nauseatingly petrified form of living death.

We all risk total suffocation but for the occasional appearance of a genuine work of hope like this book, we can only hope that Fisher continues the ongoing effort to construct the new reality with as much precision, passion and belief in the near future.

Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body

My new essay in Deleuze Studies,Vol. 3, Dec. 2009 here

This essay presents a detailed reading of Deleuze's philosophical analysis of Bacon's triptychs in The Logic of Sensation, and examines claims regarding their non-narrative status as well as exploring their capacity to embody and express a spiritual sensation of eternal time.

Kleist

Kleist: A Short Photo-Roman - Coming Soon