Another quotation

Paul is a bureaucromancer — his obsession is with bureaucracy, and his magic consists in changing the world by filling out and filing bureaucratic forms. He can access any data that has been collected bureaucratically, by the government or by private businesses. He can pull papers out of thin air, fill then up with forms, checkboxes, and specifications, and by signing the papers conjure what he has written into objective effect. This is because Paul’s philosophy of life — his all-consuming obsession, in fact — is to see bureaucracy as the cornerstone of civilisation, as humankind’s unique tool for fending off violence and oppression, for establishing the very possibility of safety, stability, and comfort, and for making fairness and equality at least thinkable and potentially obtainable. This is quite wonderful, because it encapsulates an idea which goes against all the assumptions of our age. If there is one thing that everyone in our neoliberal age hates, it is bureaucracy. Everyone from Rand Paul to David Graeber detests it. Politicians always loudly oppose it. Leftists want to hang the last bureaucrat along with the last billionaire, or the last priest. The Tea Party sees it as a scourge to be eliminated. So-called “centrists” or “moderates” are mealy-mouthed about it, just as they are mealy-mouthed about everything — but they still insist on getting rid of it, as much as they ever insist on anything. Modernist literature, from Kafka on down, figures bureaucracy as the central scourge of 20th- (and now 21st-) century life. FLEX is nearly the only contemporary book I have ever read that supports bureaucracy, and even celebrates it. 

Now of course, the deep hypocrisy, or “dirty little secret” of our age is that in fact it runs entirely on (disavowed) bureaucracy. Reagan and Thatcher introduced massive levels of it, precisely as a means of destroying the welfare state, of “deregulating” various institutional practices, and of promoting “efficiency” and “competition”. (We get a lot of this in academia in particular, where things more and more turn upon various mechanisms of supposedly objective assessment, of quantification, etc.). All large corporations are heavily bureaucratised, and perform the very sort of central planning that was ritualistically denounced as an obscenity when governments tried to practice it. Big Data is not just a consequence of computational technology per se, but precisely of the bureaucratisation of it. 

Steven Shaviro

Yes, look at me, all Walter Benjamin-esque in my last post, juxtaposing two quotations in order to make a critique about a book. If not easier, then certainly something which is quicker to write. I always wanted to make quotations a part of this blog - similar to a commonplace book - but it's not really worked out as successfully as I'd hoped. The blog is mostly written to please myself, but I'd hope it was at least of some interest to others if you come across it.

And now, here's another quotation, from Steven Shaviro's review of Ferrett Steinmetz’s novel FLEX, a novel which I confess I haven't read. Shaviro it seems to me makes a really insightful point here about the reality of bureaucracy in modern life, which in my view at least chimes perhaps somewhat obliquely not only with my last post, but also with another recent post where I tried to make a point about two of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels.

My next post will hopefully be somewhat more substantial than these last couple. Or else it won't.

Martin Amis, Success

1990 UK tv serial (1977-8). BBC TV….Most episodes written Wilfred Gretorex (1921-    ), who devised the series, or Edmund Ward. 

…Reflecting the fears of the middle classes in the 1970s, this serial, set in a socialist UK of 1990, warns of what could happen if the welfare state continued in its present direction. The country is run by the PCD, an all-powerful bureaucracy that incorporates the trade-union movement within its machinery; the only people free of its control are a select elite possessing Privilege Cards. The story concerns the efforts of a lone journalist ([Edward] Woodward) to outwit the system in such ways as helping people to escape to the USA, still a bastion of freedom.

John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)

We’re getting taken over - that’s for sure, also. Everyone is a bit sweaty at my work these days. We’re all having a bit of a bad time these days. It now looks as though we will be obliged (I expected this) to affiliate with the Union, regularising staff rates of pay, holidyas, office hours, luncheon vouchers, going to the lavatory, etc. In return, the office will enjoy considerable increases of salary and proportionate rationalisations of personnel. 

It’s a nervous time for all of us here. This is is not a bad office, but at the moment it has a bad feel. Disgruntlement hangs in the air; it hangs in the air like migraine. …There are no new jobs and nobody wants to go looking for them. Nobody wants to go. (And it seems that we can’t protect each other. If we were in the Union we would be able to, but you can’t get organised until you get organised.) 

Martin Amis, Success (1978)

It's great to be Punjabi!

It's a complaint I've seen frequently made in the context of African music or literature: simply, that to ascribe a single cultural identity to an entire continent that is the size of Africa is cultural blinkered at best, and outright racist at it's worst.

My ongoing education in and enjoyment of Hindi cinema (or Bollywood, as it is now popularly known) is teaching me something very similar about India. India at least, is a single nation, unless you want to include Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of the 'single nation' which was broken at the original moment of Independence/Partition in 1947 (but that is to be far more politically contentious than I either wish, or even feel qualified to be here). Yet, it's also a collection of federal states, all with their particular individual cultures and languages, a palimpsest of the many different cultures and rulers that have existed in the subcontinent. It's sobering to think that the only language which is spoken across the entire subcontinent is English. Indeed - and enough people have told me this, so I take it to be true - despite efforts on behalf of Hindi, it's still not really spoken in the South of the Subcontinent, seen as a cultural imposition in a way that English is not (and English is after all the international language of the world - business, academia, etc.).

It may only be an inadvertent consequence of the particular writers I've read, but I realised a while ago that, aside from R.K. Narayan, all of the Indian writing I've read comes either from the North, or else from Bombay. Is this just a consequence of the particular books which are available to me, especially in Britain? I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but one of the unfortunate consequences of the rise of Indian writing in English over the last few decades is that it has also flattened our view of the subcontinent. Arguably Rushdie's real lasting influence after his Booker win with Midnight's Children was not his style of magic realism, but rather his concern with Indian history and politics, and the sense that the Indian nation could be encapsulated entire in Very Big Books.

Bollywood of course, is only one particular film industry in India. As an arthouse film enthusiast, the first Indian filmmaker I encountered was naturally Satyajit Ray. When I first saw The Chess Players and Pather Panchali as an undergraduate, as far as I was concerned I was watching 'Indian' cinema. I knew that his work was different from Indian popular cinema (if I even had much of an idea of what that is at that point), but that was only because all arthouse cinema is culturally positioned adjacent to more popular work. And from what I understand, Ray was also a filmmaker who was concerned to position himself as very different from the majority of cinema produced in India (whether this was because he knew that he had a substantial audience abroad, or for reasons of cultural snobbery, I don't rightly know; likely it was some combination of the two). Now of course, I would contextualise his work as part of Bengali cinema, even though I've still seen very few Bengali films.

Right, this is a much longer preamble that what I intended to write, when all I really wanted to do was post a couple of videos! Like humour, cultural and regional stereotypes are one of the hardest things to translate. So I'm very lucky to have the Punjabi girl I'm married to sitting next to me when I watch some of these films, as she can explain cultural nuances and stereotypes when Bollywood uses them. And the more I see, the more I'm starting to recognise. Something I have noticed is the presence of Punjab. Part of this is probably down to the presence of so many Punjabis in the industry both in front of and behind the camera. Or so I am told this is the case. The presence of song and dance numbers in Bollywood films - one of the main things which signals 'Bollywood' to foreigners like me - may even be down to the use of musical numbers in traditional Punjabi theatre. When sound arrived in Hindi cinema, they were the natural people to employ in the industry, since they already had a strong tradition of acting, and so the theatrical traditions were also imported into the new sound cinema (no doubt the actual history is a lot more complicated than this). Of course, we used to have musicals in English language cinema too, and that was probably a similar theatrical influence from Broadway to Hollywood. It just wasn't part of the whole of the English language theatrical tradition (which means we have some missed opportunities; just imagine Jimmy Cagney's gangster films with added musical numbers - White Heat with songs! - you can't tell me it wouldn't have been awesome!).

One of the commentators on the second video below complains about all the Punjabi references in contemporary Hindi cinema, which potentially fails or slights audiences from other backgrounds that Hindi cinema should(?) also be serving. It doesn't strike me as an entirely unreasonable complaint, although it feeds into the idea that Hindi cinema is the Indian 'national' cinema, responsible for representing the entire nation in a way that other Indian regional cinemas are not expected to do. But on the other hand, I'm married to a Punjabi girl, so for me personally, I'm happy to go along with songs which celebrate Punjabi wedding songs:

Or which appears to amount to little more than 'Being Punjabi is awesome!':

Shot in a single take!