Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter's They Live ("one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left"), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek's stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.

Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

The late Mark Fisher speaking at MaMa, Zagreb @ May 21, 2014, a talk held within the event "Everything Comes Down to Aesthetics and Political Economy".

The "slow cancellation of the future" is the idea that culture is re-running itself within the larger frame of capitalist consumption. Endless return to "classic sounds" within music, the revival of "retro fashion" or yet another band from the past getting back together to play their hits. There are millions of examples of how we are stuck culturally in a nostalgia extraveganza. Why this is so could be debated, but I believe it is to do with the promise of market capitalism now being exhausted under the weight of economic and ecological failures. Even the presently much flouted Artificial Intelligence is a dominance of technology over content, with much of it being derivative and process oriented. 

The result is a need, from economic, social and political perspectives, to maintain the ideology that supports consumption. But at the same time there is a necessity to pacify and direct the population within the possibilities of culture, towards a benign state of passive consumption.

To quote Fisher:

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflatioat then of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” ― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Full PDF)

"Dispatches" Beyond Belief (1992)

Dispatches is a British current affairs documentary programme on Channel 4, first broadcast on 30 October 1987. The programme covers issues about British society, politics, health, religion, international current affairs and the environment, and often features a mole inside organisations under journalistic investigation.

On the evening of February 19th, 1992 Dispatches featured a special episode about Satanic ritual abuse. Days later, newspapers reported that the video was misrepresented. The clips of the alleged abuse were drawn from First Transmissions (1982), an experimental video produced by Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (T.O.P.Y.) a geographically disperse occult collective committed to subverting mainstream media.

Presented by journalist Andrew Boyd, the Dispatches show promised to present, for the first time, the programmed claimed unequivocal evidence of Satanic abuse and ritual murder having been carried out in Britain. The show featured the testimony of an alleged survivor of Satanic abuse, 'Jennifer', and had been trailed heavily with reports in the broadsheet newspapers in the days leading up to broadcast. In particular, the show was able to shockingly broadcast clips of a tape that the British police had seized a decade earlier which, the programme makers claimed, was a home-video recording of a Satanic ritual killing. Over a hundred people called a helpline number advertised after the show ended.

Far from being a Satanic snuff movie, the video was quickly determined after broadcast to be performance art video by TOPY, an offshoot of a group of musicians and performers including Genesis P. Orridge's Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV. Most shockingly of all, First Transmission had itself been funded by Channel 4.

The show was denounced in the media over the following days and weeks as a grotesque lapse of journalistic integrity. The programme stands as a particular testament to a moment in British social, cultural and criminal history at the height of the so-called 'Satanic Panic' which swept the USA as well as the UK in the 1980s. There is an extensive interdisciplinary literature on the programme and its associated impacts and phenomena, from historians, art historians, criminologists, psychologists and others. The overwhelming majority of commentary on Beyond Belief is critical of the programme.

A transcript of the broadcast has been shared online and there is considerable information about the programme to be found. The show itself, though, has never been repeated, and has never been made available online in full. The show has also proven difficult to access by professional researchers in archive holdings at Channel 4, or at the production company, Looktwice.

In November 2020, YouTube user 'RileyELFuk' made a 37 minute version of the show available on their channel which runs to the final credits. About 8 minutes of the 45 minute broadcast time (10:30pm - 11:15pm) are thus still missing. Comparing this upload with the transcript suggests that much of this time would have been taken up by advertisements before the show started, as only one page of the transcript, featuring the programme's introduction, are clipped from the film.

The role of computerised media in this program is interesting. It came out right at the cusp between the earlier cultural networks of mail and radio, clubs and cellars (to reference the site of satanic abuse) and the rise of the internet, where much of this culture exists today. Terrorism is even named as a source for the satanic abuse, in how its 'survivors' manifest PTSD. Computers feature in many of the interviews, often as a backdrop to interviewees appearing as 'experts' (never for the 'victims'). At the same time the psychological explanations for how 'victims' are effected by the 'abuse' is spoken of in terms of 'imprint', 'programming', 'memory', 'information' and so on. The allegations never come to any concrete point, with names of perpetrators, or even victims, apart from the anonymous 'witnesses' speaking on camera (considering one of the few 'witnesses' Jennifer, states in the programme she murdered her own child in a ritual sacrifice, it would not have been so difficult to check up on this). The visual media depicting the 'abuse' is seen as both evidence and the corrupting material that causes the apparent abuse. However, no origin of the material is even really established. Since it was colaged performance art, mostly featuring actors, this is understandable.

This program and what it represents is important because it shows us a time when many of the present-day folk devils and moral panics were finding their form, if not their content. Attempts to police this sort of media are still underway.

The entire collection of the First Transmission videos is available here

(First Transmission was a collection of video tapes that were made available through Psychic TV's mail order system in the early 80s. Fans of the band had to own all of the albums in order to qualify to be given the videos as a gift. Psychic TV and TOPY were a kind of cultural and cult pyramid scheme).

The transcript from the Dispatches programme is available here in two parts: https://arsoninformer.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/1992-feb-19th-dispatches-program-beyond-belief-script-part-1.pdf 

https://arsoninformer.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/1992-feb-19th-dispatches-program-beyond-belief-script-part-2.pdf

Four Horsemen (2012) - Official Version

 

The economic collapse of 2008 scared us. But little has changed since then. This 2012 film explains in fine detail why and how the global society operating within a system of neoclassical economics is in grave peril. All for the sake of a relatively small percentage of the population which controls the means of production, transport and resource extraction. The banks are complicit but they are not driving the system. It is a complex and complete network of actors, institutions, unsustainable laws, practices and methods. 

A debt/credit cycle that is now a growing negative equation. Resources are in decline. Investment is no longer needed to be productive. Banking is a pyramid scheme. The rich have access to government support while the middle and working classes are forced to fend for themselves with welfare dismantled globally. The housing crisis -  which spiked in 2009 but is still ongoing -  is a well known example of how this system functions. 

The situation with the ecology of the planet and its limited resources is the frame to this crisis that has not (yet) ruptured completely. The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 identifies five major categories of threat to biodiversity: land and sea changes, pollution, species overexploitation, invasive species and disease, and climate change. The size of the problem is illustrated by the report’s data that suggests 23 percent of land is now degraded (for example, the Amazon rainforest has lost 17 percent of its area in the last 50 years), while agricultural-land use is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation. The oceans’ “dead zones” already encompass an area larger than the United Kingdom. A draft UN agreement envisages that in the next decade, at least one-third of the planet should be put under nature-conservation protection. This plan also includes targets for reducing the use of pesticides, cutting plastic waste, channeling some US$200 billion into developing countries and reducing harmful government subsidies by $500 billion per year.

If the global economic system is not dramatically reformed within the next decade the results will be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, if not the entire world's human population. There will be nowhere to go to avoid it. 

Ross Ashcroft's Four Horseman (2012) does a good job of examining the vast system that is the global economy. But on the micro and personal levels the film does not sufficiently question the ethics of wealth and accumulation. Innovation is seen as a ends in itself, rather than a focal point within the overall system of human society and how it relates to the limited resources of the planet. Four Horsemen uses a Christian ethic to justify wealth and a modernist interpretation of time to qualify a future that continues the exploitative motives of the present system but just with better rules (a 'salvation'). The film posits a capitalism managed better will be both sustainable and fair and that a two-party representative political system can still deliver the best for the majority of the population if we just get rid of lobbyists and money. I doubt these assumptions but unless action is taken to change these elements we will never know. Time is running out. 

Capitalist Realism and the New Hollywood

An exploration of Mark Fisher's concept of capitalist realism as it manifests itself in the films of the New Hollywood, such as The Godfather and Five Easy Pieces. The New Hollywood at once reveals the dominance of capitalist realism and, at times, attempts to pose a challenge to it.

The Capitalist Realism of Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror offers dystopian visions of post-capitalist futures. This video examines Fifteen Million Merits and Nosedive, considers just how they fit within a Capitalist Realist framework, and determines just how these programs might give us a glimpse of post-capitalist societies.

Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch

This show presents an audiobook-ish experience, based on a talk by Silvia Federici about her book 'Caliban and the Witch'. This book talks about how the development of capitalism is deeply entwined with processes of accumulation which needs to mold and domesticate the bodies of women in specific ways. The politics of reproduction at stake in this historical study is still very much at work today, and this book provides an invaluable background to developing struggles around reproduction and care today.

A must for anyone interested in the connections between capitalism, gender and colonialism.

We recorded this in May 2013 in Vienna at the launch of the german translation of this book, published by Mandelbaum Verlag. Find a Pdf of the original English book here http://libcom.org/library/caliban-wit...

Find this and other editions of the Sound of Movement radio show, here: https://soundsofmovement.noblogs.org/

‘The Daemonic Mucosal’ - Patricia MacCormack

MacCormack’s illustrated lecture ‘The Daemonic Mucosal’ explores, via Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari, the role of the vulvic fold, the mucosal and daemonic unions in chaos magick.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and Deleuze and the Animal (2017). MacCormack is also the co-founder of the occult-inspired club night Occulture in London.

CUNTemporary
CUNTemporary is a non-profit organisation that works with individuals and groups that explore feminist and queer art practices and theories. CUNTemporary provides a newsletter and daily listings of events related to feminist and queer art practices in the UK. The events team curates talks, screenings, exhibitions, performances, events and club nights with the participation of a multidisciplinary and international group of artists, performers and theorists, mainly in London, but also around the UK and abroad. We welcome networking and collaborative opportunities from curators, academics, artists, activists, institutions and alternative venues.


General Information
CUNTemporary
Arts | Feminism | Queer
info@cuntemporary.org | www.cuntemporary.org
Deep Trash: https://www.facebook.com/DeepTrashClub

FLÂNEUR III — BENJAMIN`S SHADOWS (1998)

In the 1998 film above, Flâneur III: Benjamin’s Shadow, Danish director Torben Skjodt Jensen and writer Urf Peter Hallberg collaborate on an impressionistic black-and-white meditation on Paris, overlaid with Hallberg’s ruminations and quotations from Benjamin. Benjamin’s fascination with nineteenth-century Paris drove his massive, unfinished Arcades Project, an excavation of the inner workings of modernity. Where One Way Street is marked by a very dated 90’s aesthetic (which may look chic now that the decade’s back in fashion), the above film is both classical and modernist, a testament to the beauties and contradictions of Paris. I think in this respect, it is a more fitting tribute to the critical and contradictory aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin. -- Open Culture

The Language Of The New Music - Documentary about Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, 1985

This is a film about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schonberg; two men whose lives and ideas run parallel in the development of Viennese radicalism. Both men emerged from the turmoil of the Habsburg Empire in its closing days with the idea of analyzing language and purging it with critical intent, believing that in the analysis and purification of language lies the greatest hope that we have. They never met and might never have fully understood one another, because while the nature of their genius they found themselves alone breaking new ground of the very frontiers of their respective disciplines. But their work springs from the same soil and shares a common ethical purpose, so that their ideas and methods echo and illuminate those of each other to a remarkable degree.

The New Sound of Music (BBC Documentary 1979)

The New Sound of Music is a fascinating BBC historical documentary from the year 1979. It charts the development of recorded music from the first barrel organs, pianolas, the phonograph, the magnetic tape recorder and onto the concepts of musique concrete and electronic music development with voltage-controlled oscillators making up the analogue synthesizers of the day. EMS Synthesizers and equipment are a heavily featured technology resource in this film, with the show's host, Michael Rodd, demonstrating the EMS VCS3 synthesizer and it's waveform output. Other EMS products include the incredible Synthi 100 modular console system, the EMS AKS, the Poly Synthi and the EMS Vocoder. Most of the location shots are filmed within the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop studios as they were in 1979. Malcolm Clarke demonstrates the Synthi 100, also known as the "Delaware", Michael Rodd demonstrates musique concrete by tape splicing and manipulation and Paddy Kingsland demonstrates tape recorder delay techniques (also known as "Frippertronics"). The Yamaha CS-80 analogue synthesizer is demonstrated by both Peter Howell and Roger Limb. The EMS Vocoder is also expertly put to use by Peter Howell on his classic "Greenwich Chorus" for the television series "The Body in Question". Dick Mills works on sound effects for Doctor Who using a VCS3 unit, and Elizabeth Parker uses bubble sounds to create music for an academic film on particle physics. Peter Zinovieff is featured using his computer music studio and DEC PDP8 computer to produce electronic variations on classic vintage scores. David Vorhaus is featured using his invention, the MANIAC (Multiphasic ANalog Inter-Active Chromataphonic (sequencer)), and playing his other invention, the Kaleidophon -- which uses lengths of magnetic tape as velocity-sensitive ribbon controllers. The New Sound of Music is a fascinating insight into the birth of the world of recorded and electronic music and features some very classic British analogue synthesizers creating the electronic sounds in this film. The prime location for these demonstrations is the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where much creativity and invention took place during the period the workshop was in operation in the latter part of the twentieth century. Electronic music today is used everywhere, and many musicians gain inspiration from the past, as well as delving into the realms of sonic structures and theories made possible by the widespread use of computers to manipulate sounds for the creation of all kinds of musical forms.

The Stuart Hall Project (John Akomfrah), 2013

I met John Akomfrah once. I was leaving a screening of "7 Songs for Malcolm X" early at the Museum of Visual Culture in Umeå Sweden in 2007 (parental duties called). He was sitting in the foyer while the film was screening. I approached him and thanked him for his work, (Handsworth Songs is a work of genius), and he said he was now working on a biopic of Fela Kuti. As far as I know he has not finished it. I hope he does one day.

The Stuart Hall Project is a 2013 British film written and directed by John Akomfrah centred on cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who is regarded as one of the founding figures of the New Left and a key architect of Cultural Studies in Britain. The film uses a montage of documentary footage together with Hall's own words and thoughts to produce what Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called "an absorbing account", awarding it four stars and stating that it has "an idealism and high seriousness that people might not immediately associate with the subject Hall pioneered".

Sight and Sound magazine's Ashley Clark described it as "a strongly personal work" that "unfolds simultaneously as a tribute to a heroic figure, a study of the emergence of the New Left and its attendant political ideas, and a summation, in thematic and technical terms, of the key characteristics of Akomfrah’s body of work thus far (intertextuality, archival manipulation, a focus on postcolonial and diasporic discourse in Britain)."

Slavoj Žižek- If Communism Failed How do we Avoid the Cynical Conclusion that Capitalism Won?

Slavoj Žižek: FAQ-Room 2 - 19. November 2015

"The recent events in Greece - the forced capitulation Syriza - have once again made ​​it clear where the key problems of today's leftists are: How can we ever imagine a perspective that actually weakens the power of global capital? Specifically: What happens if one is elected "radical left" government? What can they really do? How can they avoid the social democratic compromise without falling into the state socialist trap?"- Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, born in 1949 in Ljubljana, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and teaches at Birkbeck College for the Humanities in London. His brilliant publications and equally inspiring and entertaining performances have triggered as much euphoric approval as wild condemnation. But undeniable, he is one of the most influential intellectuals and analysts of the 21st century and the most important thinker of the New Left.

Hip-Hop Beyond Beats & Rhymes

Critically reading hip hop in this 2006 documentary film written, produced, and directed by Byron Hurt. The documentary explores the issues of masculinity, violence, homophobia and sexism in hip hop music and culture, through interviews with artists, academics and fans. Hurt's activism in gender issues and his love of hip-hop caused him to feel what he described as a sense of hypocrisy, and began working on the film.

Paul Gilroy’s 2015 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture – “Offshore Humanism”

Prof. Gilroy delivered the lecture in Exeter in September. He is Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths (1995-1999).

Prof. Gilroy’s research interests include postcolonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia, and the emplotment of English victimage; the cultural politics of European decolonisation; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and “identity”; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. He has also published on art, music and social theory.

His many publications include “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Unwin Hyman, 1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010, Harvard University Press).

The Antipode Foundation and Antipode‘s publisher Wiley sponsor sessions at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG). These annual international conferences are widely seen as vital venues for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas, and we invite presenters who represent both the political commitment and intellectual integrity that characterise a radical journal of geography.

Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan (1999)

"Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development" (McLuhan 1964 352).

Duration: 45 minutes

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which people communicate than by the content of the communication." - Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan, one of Canada's most influential and controversial figures, burst into the centre of media circles in North America with his strange and prophetic pronouncements - "electric light is pure information" - on advertising, television and the emerging computer age.

Known for his imaginative descriptions of the media environment, McLuhan coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'the global village.' These two aphorisms still linger on the tongues of critics, philosophers and pop-culture makers as McLuhan's predictions and revelations continue to be proven true over and over again.

Initially celebrated, later doubted and recently resurrected, McLuhan has stood the test of time as one of the truly innovative minds of this century. Some of his statements are as fresh today as they must have been when he first appeared on North American televisions in the 1960s. "Where advertising is heading is quite simply into a world where the ad will become a substitute for the product," said McLuhan.

With the help of family, friends, and theorists, McLuhan is revealed. Deeply conservative, reserved, difficult, uncomfortable with the fame he sought, this very private man remained an enigma for most of his life. The documentary charts the course of McLuhan's life and work, his successes and failures, paying careful attention to the central principle of his work - the medium. Out Of Orbit also pays tribute to McLuhan, his message, and the way in which his theories and words have penetrated and influenced the consciousness of today's media literate society.

Original Air Date - November 30, 1999

The Weekly Zizek: Don't Act Just Think

Zizek delivers the good yet again. Sure, you want to smash capitalism, but what then? Where you going to get your iPod and retro designer clothes?

Transcript

Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism is . . . and this, almost I’m tempted to say is what is great about it, although I’m very critical of it . . . Capitalism is more an ethical/religious category for me.  It’s not true when people attack capitalists as egotists.  “They don't care.”  No!  An ideal capitalist is someone who is ready, again, to stake his life, to risk everything just so that production grows, profit grows, capital circulates.  His personal or her happiness is totally subordinated to this.  This is what I think Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt School companion, thinker, had in mind when he said capitalism is a form of religion.  You cannot explain, account for, a figure of a passionate capitalist, obsessed with expanded circulation, with rise of his company, in terms of personal happiness.

I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist.  But let’s not have any illusions here.  No.  What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really want?  What should replace the system?”  And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn't serve money.  Money should serve people.”  Well, frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it, especially because he would say, “When people serve money, money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no?  So either this or some kind of a vague connection, social democracy, or a simple moralistic critique, and so on and so on.  So, you know, it’s easy to be just formally anti-capitalist, but what does it really mean?  It’s totally open. 

This is why, as I always repeat, with all my sympathy for Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s result was . . . I call it a Bartleby lesson.  Bartleby, of course, Herman Melville’sBartleby, you know, who always answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” . . . The message of Occupy Wall Street is, I would prefer not to play the existing game.  There is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the existing forms of institutionalized democracy are not strong enough to deal with problems.  Beyond this, they don't have an answer and neither do I.  For me, Occupy Wall Street is just a signal.  It’s like clearing the table.  Time to start thinking.

The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.”  When this mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth century.  No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay, but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives.  So, let’s confront that serious problem here. 

Also, let’s not remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try to get rid of the predominance of money market economy.  The price they paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination, like you no longer will even formally flee.  You had to obey orders, a new authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish market without regressing again into relations of servitude and domination.

My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start thinking.  Don't get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure.  Do something. Let’s do it, and so on.  So, no, the time is to think.  I even provoked some of the leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis 11 . . . , that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly.  The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking.” 

Second thing, I’m not saying people are suffering, enduring horrible things, that we should just sit and think, but we should be very careful what we do.  Here, let me give you a surprising example.  I think that, okay, it’s so fashionable today to be disappointed at President Obama, of course, but sometimes I’m a little bit shocked by this disappointment because what did the people expect, that he will introduce socialism in United States or what?  But for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an important one.  This is a great thing.  Why?  Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on.  I think this freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure ideology.  But at the same time, universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist notion.  It’s something that exists all around and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western European countries. 

So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or what.  No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively successfully and so on.  So that would be my idea, to carefully select issues like this where we do stir up public debate but we cannot be accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.

Directed / Produced by

Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Gilles Deleuze on Cinema - What is the Creative Act? (1987)

This 45 minute talk at a conference in 1987 on the "act of creation" in cinema is perhaps the most intimate capture of Gilles Deleuze on film besides the Abécédaire interview. Gilles Deleuze speaks continuously and fluidly in a raspy but gentle and sincere voice that betrays much reverence for the work of figures such as Bresson and Kurosawa, particularly as concerns what Deleuze claims to be an absolute need of theirs to adapt the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky for film. Other figures discussed include Syberberg, Straub and Duras, along with a discussion of Foucault and disciplinary societies. Deleuze concludes with a meditation on what he calls the "mysterious connection between the work of art and the act of resistance."

George Steiner

Part One Part Two

An interview with the literary critic and writer George Steiner on his life and work, made in 2007. For a higher quality (downloadable) version, and many video interviews of others, please see www.alanmacfarlane.com

Professor George Steiner was born in Paris on 23 April 1929. His family moved to the United States in 1940 and he was educated at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of the editorial staff at The Economist in London during the 1950s before beginning an academic career as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1956. He was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton in 1959. He has been a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961 and was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

Professor Steiner has held visiting professorships at Yale, New York University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government and the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy. 

Wiki Rebels: A Document on Wikileaks

Exclusive rough-cut of first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it!

From summer 2010 until now, Swedish Television has been following the secretive media network WikiLeaks and its enigmatic Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.

Reporters Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist have traveled to key countries where WikiLeaks operates, interviewing top members, such as Assange, new Spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, as well as people like Daniel Domscheit-Berg who now is starting his own version – Openleaks.org!

Where is the secretive organization heading? Stronger than ever, or broken by the US? Who is Assange: champion of freedom, spy or rapist? What are his objectives? What are the consequences for the Internet?