Secularism and Prole Drift

In marketing there's an expression called Prole Drift. It's what happens when products considered identity markers by the urban middle class and above are devaluated and become toxic as they are embraced by the lower orders. Burberry is one example: originally marketed toward professionals, it became a staple of British chav culture and is now considered low-brow. Automobile aficionados can attest to how the same thing happened with the BMW 3 series, or more infamously, the whole Porsche brand after the Boxter was released. High-quality coffee products likewise lost their aura of exclusivity as soon as the rabble could afford and appreciate them. It's even happening to cocaine.

Arguably a similar process is going on in the marketplace of ideas. When secular liberalism was first marketed, the militant hardline version as well as the softer Can't-We-All-Get-Along package, it was for the educated populace from respectable homes, who could appreciate and afford art, who had the time and energy to go to the opera and discuss topics of interest in the pretty salons. We all know what happened: the Western European working class eventually stopped clutching their crosses and demanded that the clergy and their power-structures step out of their lives. As laïcité, women's lib, family planning and other such marvels of modernity became everyman's property, enter Houellebecq and his ilk telling us how half-empty our cup of freedom is and what self-serving swine we've all become.

Recently, the Guardian commentator Giles Fraser has provided us with a prime example of this curious dynamic in action. As the wrong kind of white people have finally embraced the notion that religious ideas have no place in determining public discourse, to maintain the precious distinction there is no choice but for the middle class to latch onto another group, no matter how reactionary, while pointing all the time vaguely toward colonialism, but like the unfortunate Richard Seymour of Jacobin (instructing us to read Edward Said and then come back to the discussion), never properly explaining what upper-class plundering of poor countries has to do with drawing Muhammad, funny or otherwise.

During South African apartheid, one of the main arguments against full integration was that it would ruin the beautiful and mysterious indigenous African cultures, the integrity of whose communities better protected by fences and death squads. Today the well-meaning profesionals most likely cannot give a future to the “disaffected banlieues”, but it can give them a cardinal's hat with which to prance around. We don't know what the Muslim population thinks of being turned into a Muslim community (though Kenan Malik has written extensively about the political process involved) or being reduced to a hipster affectation, but right now it does answer a desperate need on part of the middle class to distinguish itself from the vulgar swine that keep running away with their ideas.

Krenkelsesfellesskap

There is nothing like public outrage to bring a neurotic population together. It provides, for a short moment during its outburst, not only an easy access-point to the moral high ground, as the casual observer might be lead to believe. It also creates a sense of community, of belonging, however ephemeral. Moreover, the warm feeling we get when we are offended together has attracted an offense industry staffed by smug journalists who specialise in providing the population with stories of people using the wrong word or otherwise stepping over a moral boundary, easily shareable through social media. In size and intensity, the resulting hurricanes of self-satisfied rage at the person “called out” usually dwarfs the initial offense as everyone's bad conscience is projected upon the culprit.

Real Fascism is Boring, Part 2

Post-Irony and the Rise of the Security State

Once again it's that day when we are all supposed to wipe that jaded grin off our faces and feel the grasp of our innermost sincerity in the face of a memory of that day when everything went wrong. A coveted treasure-trove for propagandists of all shades, the terrorist attack of a few years ago has been framed as an assault on such various lofty apparitions as the nation, the liberal-democratic form of government, the workers' movement and suchlike. With no shortage of pompous, self-important contestants to the post-22/7 cake, the general agreement seems to be that of a general agreement as such, its dire emphasis rivalled only by its vagueness, its content secondary to its very existence.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the public demonstrations of (os-)love that have followed. But herein lies their true danger. When politicized, love becomes false and perverted. As we have known since Robespierre, nothing lends legitimacy to totalitarian means as easily as a rhetoric of love, dissolving the distance between subjects, between private and public, zoe and bios. Without a minimum of public alienation, no space for rational political discourse is possible, and we are left with Lippestad's doctrine of totalberedskap or Total Preparedness – a principle not only impossible to achieve, but which also has no place in a democratic society.

initiation;

We do not really want what we think that we want. There is always something extra, something for which the desired object is a symbol, its undead more-than-itself quality. The worst thing that can happen to a desire is that it becomes Real, that its inner emptiness is uncovered. The Real is its nightmare-state.

Terrain-Vague: a Troll Geography

Between the regulated intensity of the cityscape and the postcard-wholesome countryside there grows a steadily thickening belt of non-location – easily definable in terms of GPS coordinates or dots on a map, yet difficult to grasp in the subjective geography. 

Vørds, part 01

Or: Notes toward a Norwegian-English Dictionary

F60.6

Daytime is eyes everywhere, burning tyrant above casting needles of open sight. You know they can't see through you, you're not transparent, but still you cannot but think of breaking CCTV cameras and mobile phones, crushing eyeballs. You fear that these thoughts too are visible, so eventually you sleep through these hours, preferring to come out of your hole after dark. Dodge, walk away, be gone.