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.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Sunday 26 July 2015
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)
21 Libertarian Propositions about the World and Individuation
1. There is an underlying reality whose true nature we cannot know.
2. We construct our world through more or less effective manipulation of signs or symbols for things.
3. The most effective form of sign and symbol manipulation is science expressed as technology (the actual manipulation of matter for proven effect) but other manipulations include arts that manipulate the signs and symbols themselves and which manipulate the minds of others.
4. Technological change and individual creativity and needs have an iterative effect on the signs and symbols inherited from generation to generation of persons through tradition. All culture is thus contingent.
5. Each person is faced with a world of signs and symbols that have not been chosen by them but have been given to them. In this sense, ‘they have not chosen their parents’. This world of given signs and symbols continues to impose values on them at every moment of their existence.
6. Each person has an underlying reality of bio-physical processes for which signs and symbols are necessary in order to function in the world.
7. Each person struggles between self-generated signs and symbols on the one hand, making use of what is given, and signs and symbols given to them in the interest of others. Each calibrates himself or herself between the two in order to function in the world.
8. Individuation is right calibration but the signs and symbols of the world are dysfunctional in this context to the degree that they are not ordered either in relation to scientific principles or not calibrated with the biological reality of the person as a mind embedded in a body and a history.
9. Signs and symbols may be very functional for society in the aggregate yet be dysfunctional in relation to nature or the individual – it is a political act to demand that signs and symbol manipulation accord with discovered nature and with individual aspiration or need.
10. A poorly calibrated society is one in which signs and symbols are not calibrated with technological and natural phenomena (i.e. are revealed or traditional religion) or with the signs and symbols of choice of free persons (i.e. are totalitarian or ideological).
11. The signs and symbols of the person are dysfunctional to the degree that they are not in alignment with the needs of the biological person in its form of consciousness at any one time.
12. In order for individuation to take place, the biological person needs to create signs and symbols that express its own reality but which are still in accord with the technological and natural reality of the world in which it inhabits.
13. A poorly calibrated person is one who either accepts the signs and symbols of a society without calibrating these with his own ‘true nature’ (‘repression’) or one whose personal signs and symbols are disconnected from natural or technological reality (’madness’).
14. A person who does not accept the signs and symbols of society but is in accord with natural or technological reality is not mad – society is mad under such conditions.
15. A society is repressive if it accords with natural or technological reality yet refuses to accept the right of persons to calibrate their own signs and symbols within that reality.
16. There is nothing universal in the process of calibration. Society is contingent and persons are contingent in space and time. Finding the universal as sign or symbol for individuation is a contradiction in terms, an abnegation and a determination by the individual to choose signs and symbols that are disconnected from underlying material realities.
17. This is not to say that there is nothing that is not ‘universal’ but whatever is universal and is not scientific is beyond the human and is unknowable - to claim to know is to promote an illusion.
18. It is a presumption to think that any mind can escape a world of contingent signs and symbols. A temporary but possibly transformative discovery of one’s own reality (but not that of the universe) is the most that transcendent strategies can achieve – such strategies may tell you nothing about the universe but a great deal about yourself.
19. All persons are equal in their right to their own construction of signs and symbols even if some are more able to do so than others. All societies are oppressive to the degree that they dictate the acceptance of signs and symbols that are not scientific facts of matter. Religion and culture are not facts of matter. They cannot be rightfully dictated.
20. The greater the number of signs and symbols in a society, the greater the choice for individuals and the more language there is available for individuation. Individuation can only take place in a free society in which religion and culture are tools for (and not the masters of) individuals.
21. The three platforms of individuation are:
• Understanding all things as contingent and not universal
• Understanding the ultimate material base to all consciousness
• Seeing individuation as a process or calibration in relations between the given and the chosen
2. We construct our world through more or less effective manipulation of signs or symbols for things.
3. The most effective form of sign and symbol manipulation is science expressed as technology (the actual manipulation of matter for proven effect) but other manipulations include arts that manipulate the signs and symbols themselves and which manipulate the minds of others.
4. Technological change and individual creativity and needs have an iterative effect on the signs and symbols inherited from generation to generation of persons through tradition. All culture is thus contingent.
5. Each person is faced with a world of signs and symbols that have not been chosen by them but have been given to them. In this sense, ‘they have not chosen their parents’. This world of given signs and symbols continues to impose values on them at every moment of their existence.
6. Each person has an underlying reality of bio-physical processes for which signs and symbols are necessary in order to function in the world.
7. Each person struggles between self-generated signs and symbols on the one hand, making use of what is given, and signs and symbols given to them in the interest of others. Each calibrates himself or herself between the two in order to function in the world.
8. Individuation is right calibration but the signs and symbols of the world are dysfunctional in this context to the degree that they are not ordered either in relation to scientific principles or not calibrated with the biological reality of the person as a mind embedded in a body and a history.
9. Signs and symbols may be very functional for society in the aggregate yet be dysfunctional in relation to nature or the individual – it is a political act to demand that signs and symbol manipulation accord with discovered nature and with individual aspiration or need.
10. A poorly calibrated society is one in which signs and symbols are not calibrated with technological and natural phenomena (i.e. are revealed or traditional religion) or with the signs and symbols of choice of free persons (i.e. are totalitarian or ideological).
11. The signs and symbols of the person are dysfunctional to the degree that they are not in alignment with the needs of the biological person in its form of consciousness at any one time.
12. In order for individuation to take place, the biological person needs to create signs and symbols that express its own reality but which are still in accord with the technological and natural reality of the world in which it inhabits.
13. A poorly calibrated person is one who either accepts the signs and symbols of a society without calibrating these with his own ‘true nature’ (‘repression’) or one whose personal signs and symbols are disconnected from natural or technological reality (’madness’).
14. A person who does not accept the signs and symbols of society but is in accord with natural or technological reality is not mad – society is mad under such conditions.
15. A society is repressive if it accords with natural or technological reality yet refuses to accept the right of persons to calibrate their own signs and symbols within that reality.
16. There is nothing universal in the process of calibration. Society is contingent and persons are contingent in space and time. Finding the universal as sign or symbol for individuation is a contradiction in terms, an abnegation and a determination by the individual to choose signs and symbols that are disconnected from underlying material realities.
17. This is not to say that there is nothing that is not ‘universal’ but whatever is universal and is not scientific is beyond the human and is unknowable - to claim to know is to promote an illusion.
18. It is a presumption to think that any mind can escape a world of contingent signs and symbols. A temporary but possibly transformative discovery of one’s own reality (but not that of the universe) is the most that transcendent strategies can achieve – such strategies may tell you nothing about the universe but a great deal about yourself.
19. All persons are equal in their right to their own construction of signs and symbols even if some are more able to do so than others. All societies are oppressive to the degree that they dictate the acceptance of signs and symbols that are not scientific facts of matter. Religion and culture are not facts of matter. They cannot be rightfully dictated.
20. The greater the number of signs and symbols in a society, the greater the choice for individuals and the more language there is available for individuation. Individuation can only take place in a free society in which religion and culture are tools for (and not the masters of) individuals.
21. The three platforms of individuation are:
• Understanding all things as contingent and not universal
• Understanding the ultimate material base to all consciousness
• Seeing individuation as a process or calibration in relations between the given and the chosen
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