Post Category → Books & Literature

Ape and Essence

In was recently reminded of one of my favourite books from my late teens – Aldous Huxley’s “Ape and Essence” (1948).

Here are some quotes:

Vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, noughts and crosses, eagles and hammers. Mere arbitrary signs. But every reality to which a sign has been attached is thereby made subject to its sign. Goswami and Ali used to live in peace. But I got a flag, you got a flag, all Baboon-God’s children got flags; and because of the flags it immediately became right and proper for the one with the foreskin to disembowel the one without a foreskin, and for the circumcised to shoot the uncircumcised, rape his wife and roast his children over slow fires.

…

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the bum or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him. “Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way.” And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity. And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises out standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away the one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for while, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, and by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the war we don’t want yet do everything we can to bring about.”

…

“The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

Wikipedia

Everything2 entry on “Ape and Essence”

Aldous Huxley’s “Impersonal Forces”

“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.” – Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Brave New World

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Via Happy Birthday, Aldous Huxley: A Rare, Prophetic 1958 Interview by Mike Wallace | Brain Pickings

http://theyellowbrickroadfreeblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/mind-control-theories-and-techniques-used-by-mass-media/

Keywords

Last night I had a deeply irritating problem with synching nvAlt and Simplenote. It forced me to look through my hundreds of note fragments looking for the problematic note.

I came across an old note about Raymond Williams’ book “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society“.

Williams is a fairy extreme leftists (sympathised with Pol Pot) but the book is wonderful.

Here are a few excerpts:

Aberrant decoding:  An anti-structuralist term that recognises that audiences et messages in different ways to the ones intended.  ‘Encoding’ is the term used to describe the way in which media practitioners construct messages so that they can be understood by the widest possible audience, almost always the aim of media professionals. ‘Decoding’ is the term used to describe how people read these messages.  In communication theory there is an approach which claims that messages are encoded (produced) through one set of meaning structures and are therefore necessarily decoded (received) in the same linguistic framework and with the same meaning structures

Anomie:  Normlessness (a product of socil disintegration).

Aporia:  A seemingly irresolvable logial difficulty or serious perplexity.

Canon:  A list of approved texts, orginally of a religious character.

Civil society: Everything in society that is not government

Cultural capital  The transmission of privileges from one generation to the next.

Dominant/Residual/Emergent : The factions wlthln cultures that are always in a state of conflict.

Doxa:  A broader term than ideology, meaning somethihg close to comnon-sense or everyday assumptions.

Enonce/enondation : The distinction between speaking and the effects of that act.

Episteme:  The dominant mode of organising thought at a given tiistorical time.

Essentialism:  The belief that people, groups or objects have fixed, ate characteristics. A combination of social and cultural characteristics that together form a distinctive socal identity.

Feedback:  A term describing the reception and response of a message.

Flaneur: The observer.

Governmentality : Michel Foucault devised the term ‘governmentality to describe the increasing tendency over the past two centuries for the state to intervene in the lives of its citizens

Habitus:   A system of shared sodal dispositions and cognitive structures.

Hegemony:  The exerdse of cultural and social leadership by a dominant group.

Hermeneutics:  Understanding how understanding works: a theory of interpretation.  Its basic philosophical meaning refers to translating something not understooda textinto a comprehensible form. We might say it refers to the process of interpretation, and it was generally used to describe the interpretation of biblical texts. Its current usage refers to our understanding of how understanding takes place, particularly in relation to how readers understand the meaning of works of art and literature.

Metanarrative:  Stories about stories (Jean-Fran ois Lyotard).

Metaphor/metonymy:  Metaphor: the substitution of one term for another.

Metonymy: the substitution of an element of a term for the term itself.

Moral panic : A media spiral in which sodal control and hysteria escalate social problems.

Phenomenology:  A philosophical approach that concentrates on the meaning of experiences.

Subaltern:  The underclass; the oppressed in colonial societies.

The book is available at Amazon.com 

Raymond Williams on Wikipedia

Excerpts on Culture and Popular