11 November 2010

A Jacobin justification of Millbank...

Yesterday's events in at the impressively well-attended student fees protest in London reminded me of this scene from Marat/Sade (1967). An English-language film adaptation of Peter Weiss' pithily entitled play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, amongst other talented actors who are no longer with us, a young Glenda Jackson appears as a narcoleptic Charlotte Corday, the young Girondin woman who finally puts pay to Marat's inflammatory revolutionary rhetoric and lost her head for her trouble. In this scene, the late Ian Richardson - playing the inmate of Charenton asylum playing Marat (all rather meta, you must admit...) - explains the plight of the people. Over at Bright Green Scotland, Adam Ramsay basically takes up this Jacobin defence of a bit of malicious mischief at the student protests. I'm not a chap given to such tactics myself, however I think we ought to take the gist if not the detail of Marat's challenging question very seriously "What are a few looted mansions compared to their looted lives?"  Its a question of proportion. In the context of today's utterly absurd ruling in the Twitter Joke Trial, it probably behooves the cautious blogger to make plain he is not proposing French Revolutionary insurrection. I don't have enough Phrygian caps to go around anyway - and Millbank Tower is hardly the Bastille, no matter how sorry I might feel for the benighted Tories consigned to its Stygian vaults.  The national news model is familiar - excited by trivia, bored by substance; stirred up by gossip, apathetic shrugs in the face of real injustice. 50,000 folk turned up to vindicate their fears and reject the schemed hike in student fees yesterday. Its strikes me as a thin-as-gruel cynical wisdom, that congratulates itself on being more offended by a few fractured windowpanes ...





A good excuse that, to add a second unrelated scene - Marat and De Sade's Conversation concerning life and death. It also includes a vivid, monstrous description of the execution of Damiens, which I dare say a few of you will have encountered before in Foucault's Discipline and Punish...


4 comments :

  1. I've done a blogpost on this, Mr Lallands, but are you saying that if someone was angry at your blog and came round and put your windaes in then you'd ignore that lest it detracted from the substantive issue?

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  2. Its a fair question Stuart, and to be honest my piece above isn't really clear on what I'm arguing or attempting to justify.

    To be quite frank, I'm ambivalent on the issue of the destructive activities themselves. The Jacobin justification is Mr Ramsay's - which I regarded as a fine excuse to pursue my French Revolutionary obsession by posting the Marat/Sade scenes. On the substance, however, I'm not sure how far down Ramsay's rhetoric line I'd be willing to travel.

    When I suggest we should take Marat's question seriously, I was being quite precise. It a substantial challenge - and there are plenty of those wise cynics about who lack all sense of proportion on this. It does seem to me to be strange, that as long as you destroy in a soft accent, bring ruination quietly, then that's perfectly respectable.

    Again, I was trying to be precise - but probably succeeded on being obscure - when I referred to being "more offended". That isn't a coda for ignoring anything. I do appreciate that it looks problematic, not to mind a spot of affray, so long as it is perpetuated by some members of a group you are sympathetic to, ideally against another group that you dislike.

    It just strikes me that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the damage are indifferent to the social justice of the reform. In short, they're the ones who're proposing ignoring the substantive issue, rather than trying to see that there may be mischief on both sides of it.

    Or as Marat says (to this aristocratic audience) "You don't care..." and if the coalition get their way, and the country's education system is so dizzyly subject to marketisation, "not a muscle will twitch in your puffy bourgeois faces, which are now so twisted up with anger and disgust..."

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  3. I am not a supporter of the Coalition, but I thought it slightly sinister that there seemed to be a PLANNED attack on the offices of a Political Party.

    Demonstrate at the H of P by all means because that's the seat of UK Government, but once people go down the route of attacking parties(for whatever reason) that's a slippery slope. I certainly wouldn't like it if the same happened to the SNP HQ if Swinney announces cuts in education, and a graduate tax next week?

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  4. "It just strikes me that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the damage are indifferent to the social justice of the reform. In short, they're the ones who're proposing ignoring the substantive issue, rather than trying to see that there may be mischief on both sides of it."

    Well of course the obvious answer would be that they consider a more market-based solution to student funding to be more fair and just.

    More to the point, perhaps it's a case of comparing a legally enacted and implemented policy with an illegal response, and in particular one involving violence?

    In my opinion violence is a red line issue, so to speak, save in exceptional circumstances.

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