Election

On today's 'The World This Weekend' on Radio 4, they interviewed a local Labour party chairman attending the Bournemouth conference about speculation about Brown calling an election. He said that the party ought to get the election out of the way, so that they could turn their attention to a badly needed internal party debate about policy and future direction. Brown's strategy is clear enough: use briefing to fuel speculation about an early election, but refuse to rule anything out. He is unlikely to string it along until Spring 2009, but if he can keep it up until the end of next Spring, he largely averts the threat of the most politically damaging outcome - a genuine debate within the party about policy. It can't happen while there is speculation about an election around the corner, and it can't happen in the months leading up to an election (ie from about next summer).
Which all goes to demonstrate (again) that elections in the New Labour era are nothing but functions of internal party conflicts, in which the despised public are invited to express their opinion on a meaningless question.

Modernity

Nearly term-time again, so I might have some 'serious' things to write about in addition to what I find in the supermarket (although I have my fears that what I find in the supermarket is a lot more serious than what I find in the library).
An ill-thought out suggestion resting on colossal over-generalization and over-simplification follows. Any comments on why I haven't the first clue what I'm talking about graciously received.


Anyone who wants to start talking about "modernity" needs to start thinking at least as far back as the 12th century or so and start making comparisons. A certain scepticism toward claims for the "universality" or the eternal or fundamental nature of certain social institutions (nation, marriage, the body) which has tended to focus on the formation (or 'construction') of certain kinds of knowledge about these things in the 18th and 19th centuries, has reached its reductio ad absurdum. To read a lot of modern history, you'd think that nothing like the ideas of 'individual' or 'society' existed in Europe before 1750. But of course, these ideas did not just appear out of a vacuum, and if we want to understand what underlies them, we need to look a bit deeper at their development. There are the faintest indications that a few historians might be beginning to realize that 'modernity' is more like a gradual process of accommodation than a cataclysmic epistemic rupture (even if its intellectual history is characterized by 'discontinuities' on a smaller scale a la early Foucault.) These strange, paradoxical accommodations within which modernity formed its own (dis)enchantments need to be probed a lot deeper if we want to understand our situation.

Another disappointed radical conservative

"Schmitt wants here to remove from politics, especially international politics but also internal politics of an ideological kind, any possibility of justifying one's action on the basis of a claim to universal moral principles. He does so because he fears that in such a framework all claims to good will recognize no limits to their reach. And, thus, this century will see 'wars for the domination of the earth' (the phrase is Nietzsche's in Ecce Homo), that is, wars to determine once and for all what is good for all, wars with no outcome except an end to politics and the elimination of all difference."
- Tracy Strong, "Introduction" to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1996)

Uncanny.

There was a new toilet roll on special offer in Sainsburys so I thought I'd stock up. On the packet there is a photo of a small child in a suit who looks like a young Ian Hislop. The toilet roll is manufactured in Dunstable, where I was born. Click for bigger.