Speculum: Reflections on life's difficult bits

Elias Chên

C E SP

M U L U fnord

Reflections on life’s difficult bits

FIRSTCHAPTER We all know what a speculum is, right?

Er, no

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HAT IS IT to be alive in the present moment? Our world seems to be dazzled by form and heedless of content; experiences once lived directly are now lived by proxy through television, films, magazines, computer games … We are, for example, invited to intrude on others’ private grief as the media stick their microphones and cameras into the faces of those newly bereaved or subject of some horrendous accident, as if this, somehow, fulfils our quota of feelings for the moment. And that is the ‘news’. Later we are bidden to witness the agonies of overweight teens, overweight adults, people horribly disfigured by cosmetic surgery that went awry, and so on, as entertainment. This, apparently, assuages our guilt, reinforces our smugness, and allows us to draw moral lessons from the palpable idiocy, not to say culpability, of others, as we let our own grief and agony fade into the background as ‘noise’, something we can, and should, suppress, for the greater good of a ‘society’

that requires acquiescence and, preferably, indifference to the everyday monstrosities that exist in our own lives. ‘Society’? In reality nothing more nor less than an artificially created ‘reality’ foisted upon civilisation by a triumphalist and out of control capitalism supported by ever more irrelevant national governments who increasingly lack the the power the stop it, and in any case lack the will to do so. It is panem et circenses, bread and circuses, designed to keep everyone quiescent and therefore ‘safe’. We are therefore inveigled into putting our anger, our pain and our distress into places where they will do no harm, where they will pose no threat to a status quo that can only survive in the face of a widespread alienation from what is happening to us every day. Indeed, are we capable any more of feeling our own grief? Our consolation for this major sacrifice of a lived life is sublimation in the world of the commodity, things replacing feeling and experience, gadgets replacing curiosity

with momentary novelty, and various kinds of narcotics, from booze, to dope, to the telly, to the manufactured lives of all those Z-list ‘celebrities’ cluttering up the world with vacuity but softening the experience of the agony of existence in a world without meaning, a world in which any meaning there was (and there was precious little of it in the first place) has been stripped away and replaced with a consumer identity. Want to feel sad? Go to a weepy movie. Want to feel heroic? Go to an action movie. Want to feel angry? Go and see a ‘socially meaningful’ movie, or better yet an anodyne documentary carefully constructed so we can’t identify the real villains. We can feel anything we want to, vicariously, so long as we pay for it, and so long as it doesn’t leak out onto the streets, where it will quickly be labelled as a ‘problem’.

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HESE DAYS we are no longer what we are (whatever that may mean), nor are we any longer what we do or what we believe. We are, irrevocably, what we own. Admittedly this is not much of an original insight; many have seen it coming, or have noted its establishment in the social psyche. But it marks a massive shift in what we understand to be the nature of what it is to be human. Those

who own, those who are capable of owning, and those who seek to own, are the currently manufactured ‘heroes’ of the market. Conversely, those who do not own, or are incapable of owning, are scroungers and parasites. Worst of all, those who do not wish to own, or who are actively seeking identities beyond commodity relations, are the most dangerous enemies of all, undermining ‘civilisation’ as global capitalism wishes it to be understood. Authenticity, however defined, and the seeking of meaning beyond the ownership of ‘stuff’, especially transitory tat with built-in obsolescence, are to be shunned, execrated and vilified, or lampooned as unrealistically idiotic, because that way lies no profit. Unless, that is, capitalism can find a way to render them ‘safe’ and profitable, in which case they will be co-opted. Consider, for example, the ‘liberating’ effects of buying new tatty furniture with a Scandinavian design ethic. Or the ‘liberation’ of driving an over-powered car that has an impossible top speed for safe driving on any conceivable public road and a price tag that only the highest paid parasites can even hope to meet. This is ‘liberation’ as capitalism wants it; this is ‘liberation’ as lifestyle aspiration. And aspiration is only legitimate when it turns a profit. The aspiration for world peace, for equality, and plenty, and simplicity away from the rat race, are ‘hopelessly idealistic’, troublesome, and dangerous, unless, of

course, one can buy them, contrive to make a profit from them, or find a safe outlet valve for them such as a pop concert.

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OR MANY, perhaps most people who are in work, each day comprises a series of dispiriting encounters with what passes for a ‘productive’ or ‘legitimate’ occupation. But producing what, exactly? And how legitimate? The answer to the first seems simply to be ‘producing whatever will make money’, regardless of whether it is necessary or even desirable. This seems also to be the criterion for the second, legitimacy, although the state, which presides over spectacular society, is very careful to exclude certain activities from the class of legitimate occupation, such as drugs peddling and ‘organised’ crime. These activities are solely the province of the state (and its chums in business) which doesn’t want any uppity freelance ‘entrepreneurs’ muscling in on its territory, unless they pay the right people for the privilege. What is, after all, a ‘legal’ license to sell, say, drugs, except a form of protection money paid to the state, which then legitimises any outrages perpetrated on the ‘powerless’ public, i.e. those who don’t have a pass card to the sanctums of the oligarchy?

Nevertheless, those with lots of money are still treated with respect irrespective of how that money was made in the first place. A self identified Mafia Don, for example, is unlikely to be turned away from even the poshest of places just because he made his money by dodgy methods. Nor will he be turned away from the m o s t ‘respectable’ of cabals within the government or big business, just so long as he is discreet about it and doesn’t bring too much embarrassing publicity with him. It just might be related to the extensive range of extreme responses he might have at his disposal for retaliation if upset, but this is true of all wealthy people, whether or not they have a penchant for the direct methods of the concrete welly or the more indirect, and therefore more sinister methods of litigation. As to ‘organised’ crime, that really depends on how the crime is committed and whether it gets noticed. For example the crimes of Enron were only regarded as such once they were found out and couldn’t be hushed up any more. Similarly with the banks and bankers who precipitated the worldwide financial crisis that the poor people of the world are now expected to pay for. The plain fact is that their crime was getting caught out. Had

Fo rt he rec ord , fly zips open

and clos e

, just in case you were wondering

they not been rumbled, had Bernie Madoff not made off with everyone’s money, had Lehmann Brothers managed to keep their greedy secrets secret a while longer, had RBS been more careful with its avarice, had Goldbrick Sucks not been caught out with their all too clever schemes for defrauding the public, and had all the barrow boys working in the City kept their gobs shut, then their crimes would have passed unnoticed, suspected but unnoticed. As it is the cat’s out of the bag and everyone knows about it. All this was presaged by Nick Leeson, remember him? He

fnord was the creative entrepreneur who destroyed Baring’s Bank. At the time he was regarded, or at least billed as an aberration, someone who was simply out of control, and not at all like the more respectable bankers elsewhere. But it turns out he was in reality a herald of what was to come, a kind of John the Baptist figure announcing the good news that we were all going to get royally screwed by all those respectable bankers, in fact that we already were being royally screwed but hadn’t noticed yet. What the bankers did to us, and are still doing, is by any decent moral code, criminal, in terms of natural justice if not in terms of the current body of laws that are meant to protect us all (so we are told) but which in point of fact do a much

better job of protecting the very rich, often the s a m e people who are happily ripping us all off and from whom we need protection in the first place. Curiously, however, the great crimes perpetrated by the financial services sector have been scurrilously rebranded as not-crimes. We have been told that the great majority of bankers are really awfully nice chaps and chappesses (mainly chaps) who are terribly sorry for what happened, and that it was all the fault of a few bad eggs rather than being endemic to the whole of the modern banking system, indeed an essential aspect of what modern banking is, which is to say corrupt and avaricious. But the public had to be appeased, which is to say, lulled back into a stupefied torpor, so sacrificial goats had to be found. And, joy of joys, they were. Now we the public are being told by the powers that be that the demand for justice (revenge?) has been satisfied and that therefore we should all shut up and let bygones be bygones. Somehow they believe (or pretend to believe) that by sacrificing ole Bernie to the judicial system, and forcing Fred Goodwin (Fred the Shred to his mates, but Freddie the Shreddie sounds better) to take a cut in pension, justice and fairness have been restored and we should all be satisfied with that. Bob Diamond, big cheese at Barclays, meanwhile avers that the banks have done enough grovelling and that everyone should leave them alone. It almost sounds plaintive when put that way, but really the banks have done nowhere near enough grovelling for the damage they have caused. One sacrificial goat, a few tut tuttings around the

parasite par ә sīt, n. a hanger-on or sycophant who frequents another’s table: one who lives at the expense of society or of others and contributes nothing: an organism that lives in or on another organism and derives subsistence from it without rendering it any service in return: … Chambers English Dictionary It’s all a matter of energy exchange really. When an organism simply takes energy away from another without any reciprocity, then that organism is a parasite. The modern entrepreneur likes to think of himself or herself as a predator, because that is a noble image. But predators at least have the good manners to ensure that some of the prey species is alive for the future, whereas parasites have no such noble intentions. Short sighted? Yes, but that’s the parasite mentality for you.

wine bars and a rich bastard being forced to relinquish a piddling amount from an obscenely large pension pot is not nearly enough to cut it, especially when it is now clear just how much pain is going to be suffered by the not-great (that is, not filthy rich) to sort out the mess. As a footnote to this, the aforementioned Mr. Diamond was recently ‘awarded’ a bonus of £6.5m (March 2011), which together with his £2.5m salary and other perks means he was given over £20m for his ‘work’ in 2010, and this just as the rest of the UK population was beginning to wonder whether luxuries such as food might still be worth spending their money on. Compare that £20m with the mere £4m that Worcester County Council just announced it had available to spend on community projects. No wonder old Diamond Knickers wants everyone to avert their angry gaze

Handsome looking devil, inee? But only if you like the aesthetics of the corpse.

away from the banks. One wonders what he did to deserve such largesse, especially since Barclays shares are worth only about one third of what they should be, and are roughly at only half their value of a year ago. Not that it’s easy to sympathise with Barclay’s shareholders, but if this is a criterion of success then one wonders what failure looks like.

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t beggars belief just how arrogant these people really are. Not content with fleecing people of their money whenever possible, they crawl cap-in-hand to their mates in government to bale them out when things get a bit ‘sticky’, using, it must be said, money extracted without any choice from all the citizens who actually have to pay all their taxes because they can’t afford clever creative accountants to help them avoid or evade tax liabilities, unlike the banks who prefer to fiddle their tax liabilities whenever possible. They then pretend that everything is hunky dory at their end and award themselves huge bonuses again as if nothing were awry. Even RBS, which on the latest estimation is technically still in debt to the country to the tune of grillions of quid, has just announced bonuses for its ‘top’ people! And they still want us to like them and trust them!

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin … But if you want to continue to be the slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.

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LL OF THIS could have been simply ironic, but it is alas entirely inevitable that institutions who do everything in their power to avoid paying their fair whack into the exchequer, that is to say, avoid making a fair contribution to the commonweal at large, and indeed seem to avoid making any genuinely positive contributions to society at all (as opposed to the private bits of society inhabited by the megarich), then beg for assistance from that same exchequer when they find themselves short of brass. The narrative is very simple. To the banks everyone’s money is their’s by right, and they will get it by hook or by crook. To add insult to injury they then hike all their fees to their ‘customers’ as well, as if it’s all our fault that the mess happened in the first place. Sadly, the truth is that it probably is our fault, because we always let them get away with it. Of course they have armies of rich lawyers and accountants on

their side to help them stave off any attempt to make them play fair, plus all their chums in high political office, but they have been ripping us off for so long now that most of us have become convinced, in a lazy complacent unreflective way, that this is normal. But it isn’t. This is capitalism showing itself for what it really is: misanthropic; anti-social; dangerous; amoral; parasitical and self regarding. The rest of us? Just fodder for the bottom line, and nothing more. And this is just the start. It is going to get much, much worse as ‘globalisation’ takes hold, because globalisation is nothing less than letting capital off the leash of what few restraints remain to hold back its avarice thus leaving it free to roam the planet looking for plunder wherever and whenever it pleases. Globalisation will render capitalism completely untrammelled by the ties of community, country or territory, or even nature itself. This is the best of all possible worlds for the capitalist mentality: capitalism as a metanational phenomenon, rather than a merely multinational one. In such a scenario people will no longer matter in the slightest except in their capacity to be exploited. At the time of writing this, HSBC has just issued a bare threat to the UK: ‘stop trying to tax us or we will relocate to somewhere else’ which is nothing if not a scurrilous ‘invitation’ to allow capitalists, in this case bankers, to do whatever they please, outside the common law, outside general morality, and certainly beyond ordinary human decency. More companies will undoubtedly follow because at the moment no-one can stop them, and they know it. ‘Government’ is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the process as it becomes plain that large metanational corporations can (and invariably do) hold whole countries to ransom if they don’t get their way.

It is neither safe nor sensible to carry a wire garrotte in your bra

The overriding (false) metaphysic is that of ‘competitive edge’ in their wholly made-up sacralised ‘market’ in which everything is ‘monetised’ and simple (social) values are either derided or trodden underfoot.

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EANWHILE BACK in the world of real bona fide people, as opposed to life sapping parasites, life seems increasingly to be more a matter of smoke and mirrors than actual living. Or perhaps a better characterisation might be ‘through the looking glass’ because nothing is as it seems; image and appearance are everything, substance nothing. Public life seems more than ever to be devoid of integrity, and appears to be based on no discernible values except a crude pragmatism that has abandoned all pretence of morality and ethics. This presents no real surprise, however, since capitalism is essentially amoral, although often straying into the outright immoral. Life for most people has no honour to it, not even as a struggle against the elements, each day sapping vitality rather than replenishing it. Work, for the bulk of the population, remains little more than drudgery, with little of joy to it, and that despite the great promises of technological advancement. Nothing, it seems, has any genuine intrinsic value any more except in terms of its ‘market value’, not even people themselves. In the world of the image, only the image matters; substance, ‘reality’ are mere chimera of a past world, or of a world that never was. Like the prestidigitators that they are, which is to say faux magicians, the curators of the image can slip and change reality to their whims, leaving nothing with even momentary solidity. Everything is in flux, but at the deliberate behest of those

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HERE ARE, of course, several venerable philosophical traditions asserting that everything is, quite naturally, in flux. The Taoists, for example, and Heraclitus of Ephesus, he of the river into which no-one steps twice, spring immediately to mind. Their original insight became in time a truism, because most people find it relatively easy to assent to a proposition such as ‘even the mountains change’. But the whole idea has been hijacked by the spectacle for its own advantage. It is yet another appropriation made by the forces of avarice. What was a relatively benign observation on the state of nature has been turned into an attack on people, especially those who need to work to keep themselves housed and fed. In its current interpretation it is held to mean, for example, that the idea of a job for life, or a professional specialism, or the idea of personal pride in one’s work, have now become moribund on account of ‘natural’ changes in the world of work, not that most jobs were ever worth much in the first place except as a means of buying food to keep barely alive. It is also used as an excuse for a constant changing of order, leaving nothing to stabilise, even momentarily, because stability has become inconvenient to the spectacle, much as ‘tradition’ has. The deliberate and regular destabilisation of life is intended to keep people in a state of permanent uncertainty, always off balance, and therefore permanently frightened and on the defensive. This is a preemptive strike against the

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who control the magic lantern show that we all now inhabit.

Verwirrung Season of Chaos

possibility of opposition, preventing any serious organisation of a counter movement by forcing people into an isolated individualism that undermines any vestiges of solidarity, or even simple sympathy for others struggling to keep some semblance of order in a deliberately created chaos of everyday life. This is a deliberately created image, however, based on a wilfully false reading of Darwinian Evolution and riding roughshod over all the evidence, social, historical, anthropological and biological, that human beings are social animals who require sociality or conviviality, as Illich puts it, in order to survive. The spectacle has replaced sociality with a ‘war of each against all’ which will eventually see the demise of humanity, perhaps even the planet, if it is not challenged, and soon.

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HE ATTACK on the basic social nature of people all stems from the work of various arch sorcerers of the spectacle, mainly economists and their fellow travellers, who claim that keeping people in a state of uncertainty motivates them to ‘work harder’ (for capital, not necessarily for their own wellbeing). That this is a self serving myth based on no genuine idea of what actually motivates real people is besides the point, for them. They invoke the spirit of the fictitious ‘rational actor’ from the dark realms of

1st January - 14th March Thesis (Tricylce) Yin The point from which all societies begin and to which they return. The natural state of humanity. Eris, Isis, Ishtar, Kuan Yin, Kali.

Zweitracht Season of Discord 15th March - 26th May Antithesis (Tricycle) Yang Appearance of a ruling class. Leads directly to discord. Osiris, Yehovah, Zeus, Odin and all other male deities. The all-seeing eye.

Unordnung Season of Confusion 27th May - 7th August Synthesis (Tricycle) Attempt to restore balance by unnatural means, leading to confusion. Loki, the Devil, Mercury, Thoth, Raven, Coyote. Annihilation of the biogram by the logogram.

Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy 8th August - 19th October Parenthesis (Bicycle) The void. Deterioration. Great souls held in restraint by inferior people.

Grummet Season of Aftermath 20th October - 31st December Paralysis (Bicycle) Transition back to chaos. Bureaucracy chokes on its own paperwork and lack of integrity. Many begin to deny the logoram and embrace the biogram. Hermaphrodite, union of male and female.

nightmare, a malevolent demon who is in truth only a part of the fantasy of modern economics which casts real flesh and blood people as greedy, self promoting monstrosities devoid of sociality, much in the manner of the paradigm capitalist who benefits from the myth. It is not a reality, but a manufactured quasi-prediction that the Spectacle would dearly like to see fulfilled. But for the record it is a view of human motivation derived more directly from the Hitler-Stalin school of paranoid thought than a genuine appreciation of what makes real people tick, and breathe and live, and it makes roughly the same level of contribution to the progress of humanity as those two luminaries did.

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O FURTHER the process of destabilising everyday life, the spectacle has called forth a relatively new species of sycophantic semihuman. These creatures of the dark, whom we here choose to call ‘serial

reorganisers’, are a variant form of the serial killer, except that they do their work more slowly and more insidiously than their more directly malevolent counterparts. Furthermore, whilst a serial killer may despatch one or two people, perhaps twenty or thirty in their career, the serial reorganiser will indirectly kill many more people, destroying the lives, livelihoods and hope of individuals, families, communities or even whole countries. And this is achieved slowly, through the gradual

sucking out of human dignity, worth and enthusiasm for life. They make life miserable and therefore not worth living.

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RONICALLY serial killers, by virtue of the fact that they actually kill people as their adopted modus operandi, are more honest about their misanthropy than serial reorganisers (albeit with an understandable desire to be relatively discreet about it). In general they make little pretence of doing ‘good’, except, perhaps, when they are commanded by the inner voices to clean the world up a bit. Serial reorganisers, in contrast, trumpet their activities as a ‘moral good’, presenting themselves as the doers of ‘good works’ for the future welfare of all, whilst never failing to fall back on the vast array of traditionally indirect tools of democratic tyranny and injustice when challenged. This is the standard ploy of the cowardly when faced with their own perfidy. Whilst claiming to be on the side of ‘progress’, when they are thwarted or opposed, their

Thought you were one of the farmers, eh?

invariable standard response is to make immediate recourse to the criminal law, or the threat of it, to force through their decisions. Negotiation, the approach favoured by civilised well adjusted people, is seldom considered, no matter how well reasoned any opposition might be, unless it is on the terms set by the spectacle itself, those which guarantee success for power from the outset. There is no authenticity or integrity in any of this; the truth is that such people serve only the progress of capital’s ability to exploit more efficiently and effectively (a favourite phrase of this species and its allies). They are nothing more than bullies using a very old ploy to camouflage

If this book doesn’t make you angry, nothing will Dee Brown (1970) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. London: Vintage. ISBN: 0-09-952640-9 It is good to study history, if only to appreciate how Power does not change its spots, nor indeed its tactics very much. Time and ‘progress’ may bring forth slight variations, but essentially the way Power deals with the powerless remains pretty much the same as it always has. Lies, trickery and deceit are the main weapons, supplemented by a monopoly on the framing and enforcement of the laws that are supposed to work for the protection of the commonweal, but only ever work for the protection of property and the welfare of the rich. Tricksy lawyers have always been culpable in the process, as have avaricious bankers.

their misanthropy, that of claiming that what they are about is perfectly legal, whilst brushing questions of the morality of their behaviour under any convenient floor covering. They make extensive use of the ‘law’ and of contracts which are supposed to be ‘sacrosanct’, until, that is, their masters find them inconvenient; they make expansive promises, which are ignored just as soon as they get in the way; they fall back cynically on the rhetoric of a ‘future’ in which ‘all will be well’ for everyone, whilst caring nothing about the people they destroy, the values they destroy, the cultures they destroy, and the communities they destroy. Capitalism has form for this kind of behaviour. If you want a stark historical precedent have a look at the treatment of the North American Native Indians who, in the nineteenth century, finally found their way of life, land and their dignity stolen from them in just this sort of way. And it continues even now.

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he crowning cynicism of the serial reorganiser is, however, that such creatures don’t even seem to care very much about what they are doing; it is merely a job not a vocation. From experience they

seem not to care if the outcome of their actions is positive or negative, just so long as they win the plaudits and monetary rewards for being good pet hounds for their masters, slavering at their feet awaiting scraps of bounty from the master’s table. It is a vast exercise in inauthenticity. Alas they are to be found everywhere, spreading their moral vacuity through the whole fabric of culture and life itself. It’s as if there is some mysterious spawning ground in which they procreate well away from the anxious gaze of real people. Their modus operandi is to destabilise absolutely everything, and then get out of the way before the waste matter has an interface scenario with the rotating air displacement apparatus, thus to escape the repercussions of their behaviour. They are amongst the current street fighters of the spectacle, the heroes of the capitalist fantasy, but, like all street fighters, once they have reached the end of their usefulness (and thus become inconvenient), they will be sacrificed, just like their own

victims, by those who currently employ and applaud them. Perhaps they should study some history and look closely at what happens to thugs who lose their usefulness to power by reading what happened, for example, to Ernst Roehm and the Sturm Abteilung, or to the old revolutionaries who got in the way of Stalin.

At the time of writing this (8th July 2012) Bob Diamond has resigned from his position as CEO of Barclays following a ‘scandal’ in which Barclays was implicated in fixing the LIBOR rate ‘for personal profit’. What a shock. Apologists for capitalism have been heard on the radio (Radio 4 to be precise) declaiming ‘This is not capitalism!’ One is forced to ask, ‘If not, then what is?’ The fact is that fixing the ‘Free Market’ for personal gain is perfectly consistent with free market economics which, in essence, is about grabbing what you can and fuck those who can’t keep up. The current hand wringing about loss of ‘morality’ also misses the point; capitalism is, as noted before, essentially amoral, perfectly happy to manipulate democracy and fascism equally, indeed it will thrive in almost any

kind of socio-political environment so long as the profits are available, and so long as people are open to temptation. But there is no point in being angry about this, least of all angry at Bob Diamond. This situation was inevitable once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Raygun endorsed personal greed as a ‘good thing’. As it is, Bob Diamond is little more than another scapegoat, along with Fred the Shred, for the perfidy of an entire system, besides which he will hardly be left destitute. No doubt all the ‘honest’ people still in the higher levels of banking will be hoping that now Mr. D has gone they will be left alone to carry on feathering their nests with other people’s money.