Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Sunday 2 August 2015
Basic British History Posts Have Been Moved ....
For those following the Position Reserved posts on British History
(which have now reached 624AD), these have now been removed from
Position Reserved and have their own blog at http://basicbritishhistory.blogspot.co.uk The series will continue from there ...
Sunday 26 July 2015
Folk Horror - Echoes of Scarfolk Council
Scarfolk Council is the folk horror invention of Richard Littler. His genuinely creepy and disturbing (and often very funny) blog is at http://scarfolk.blogspot.co.uk He is also part of the relatively new 'hauntology' music movement which creates unearthly and uncanny ambient sounds that suggest ghostly presences.
A play list we have created on YouTube is designed to give some cultural clues to the invention but, to be honest, I suspect you have to be a child or teenager of the 1970s to recall in retrospect just how creepy life was in those days with children's programmes and public warnings that did not hold back on terror, the threat of nuclear war, mysterious unaccountable authority and, as you will see in the third item, Jimmy Saville at his disturbing peak. Scarfolk Council's own Channel is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1t7KxXy44QC5qC1R0h53Mg
Littler is excellent at bringing out the demonic potential of ordinary life, the anxieties over class, parenting and education, the links of England to its pagan past (the death of Mrs Payne found fossilised inside an ancient standing stone is emblematic) and the power of TV both to create a shared reality and subvert it in an age when whole families would sit around the electronic hearth and enter each other's preferred world - from Children of the Stones to Morecambe & Wise - only to see the kinderlings packed off to bed before the 9.00PM threshold and the arrival of the brutal reality of the News and the downbeat torments offered by Play for Today.
It would be hard for modern kids to understand that environment now - the strict routines, lack of stimulation, long boring Sundays, easy expression of sublimated fear, the demand of adults that they be 'looked up to' (even when they were being morons), the dragging survival of church-going and games as enforced penance, the way the sheep were separated from the intellectual goats, sex as the dark force of which nothing may be spoken ... and all this was only half a century ago. It is no accident that a few of the adults of that generation are now appearing in the tabloids as alleged abusers of children. The unwritten story is of the abuse of others by repressed fathers who were imprisoned in their homes like their children and wives no less than Victorian women were once imprisoned and abused in theirs. Littler captures the era as one of 'miasma' for many lost souls.
A play list we have created on YouTube is designed to give some cultural clues to the invention but, to be honest, I suspect you have to be a child or teenager of the 1970s to recall in retrospect just how creepy life was in those days with children's programmes and public warnings that did not hold back on terror, the threat of nuclear war, mysterious unaccountable authority and, as you will see in the third item, Jimmy Saville at his disturbing peak. Scarfolk Council's own Channel is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1t7KxXy44QC5qC1R0h53Mg
Littler is excellent at bringing out the demonic potential of ordinary life, the anxieties over class, parenting and education, the links of England to its pagan past (the death of Mrs Payne found fossilised inside an ancient standing stone is emblematic) and the power of TV both to create a shared reality and subvert it in an age when whole families would sit around the electronic hearth and enter each other's preferred world - from Children of the Stones to Morecambe & Wise - only to see the kinderlings packed off to bed before the 9.00PM threshold and the arrival of the brutal reality of the News and the downbeat torments offered by Play for Today.
It would be hard for modern kids to understand that environment now - the strict routines, lack of stimulation, long boring Sundays, easy expression of sublimated fear, the demand of adults that they be 'looked up to' (even when they were being morons), the dragging survival of church-going and games as enforced penance, the way the sheep were separated from the intellectual goats, sex as the dark force of which nothing may be spoken ... and all this was only half a century ago. It is no accident that a few of the adults of that generation are now appearing in the tabloids as alleged abusers of children. The unwritten story is of the abuse of others by repressed fathers who were imprisoned in their homes like their children and wives no less than Victorian women were once imprisoned and abused in theirs. Littler captures the era as one of 'miasma' for many lost souls.
Saturday 20 June 2015
Nietzsche Tells A Truth ...
Nietzsche being both a truth-teller and depressing ...
" ... ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family, groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command - considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better or longer than OBEDIENCE, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of FORMAL CONSCIENCE which commands: 'Thou shalt not unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that, in short 'Thou shalt''.
" This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its forms with a content: in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts what any commander - parent, teacher, law, class prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its ears."
From Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
" ... ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family, groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command - considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better or longer than OBEDIENCE, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of FORMAL CONSCIENCE which commands: 'Thou shalt not unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that, in short 'Thou shalt''.
" This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its forms with a content: in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts what any commander - parent, teacher, law, class prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its ears."
From Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
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