Category / Me Stuff

by Jonathan M

What Makes An Idea Popular?

In my recent piece on James C. Scott’s toweringly excellent The Art of Not Being Governed (2010), I suggested that there are unwritten laws governing the up-take of particular theories.  Laws that have less to do with logic, reason and scientific rigour than they do with our deep psychological needs.

For example, Gibbons’ The History of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789) argues that the Roman Empire fell into decline because the Romans lost their sense of civic responsibility and their hunger for military conquest.  This idea that power leads to moral corruption and that moral corruption leads to social decay seems to coincide with a similar pattern of rise and fall that features in the theories of both Giambattista Vico and Ibn Khaldun.

These different works attempt to account for radically different societies and yet they all share a similar underlying narrative.  A narrative of rise and fall that even pops up in places such as The Bible and Plato’s allegory of The Cave.  In my piece, I suggest that the over-arching narrative described by Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed is so powerful that it may come to rival that of Vico and Ibn Khaldun as a source of inspiration for writers and artists (let alone academic historians and political scientists).  My aim with this piece is to delve further into this intuition and try to unpack some of the ideas contained within it.  Does it make sense to talk about selecting theories on the basis of criteria other than truth? Do these other criteria in any way relate to truth?  What are the aesthetics of ideas?  These are some of the questions I will try to address with this piece.

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by Jonathan M

A Different Style of Criticism

Erudition is conformity.  It is to read the ‘right books’ and write in the ‘correct manner’.  It is to be a good citizen.  It is to bend the knee in order to be anointed with the kiss of acceptance.

I write the way I write and I think the way I think because of the books I read, the films I watch, the podcasts I listen to and the people I look up to.  I am a part of a set of traditions; Cahiers du Cinema meets Science Fiction fandom meets analytical philosophy meets critical theory.  Because I am a part of these various traditions, I measure my improvement in terms of my asymptotic approach to their styles and values.  In this I am no different to anyone else whether you are seeking to publish short stories, climb the corporate ladder or find love.  We all bend the knee.

This is one reason why it is always a pleasure to encounter something that is both undeniably brilliant and completely detached from the intellectual traditions to which you aspire and belong.

 

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by Jonathan M

BG 30 – Roleplaying Games and The Cluttered Self

Futurisimc have my thirtieth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Roleplaying Games and The Cluttered Self”.

The column is both a defence of Consumerism and an examination of the ways in which we express, formulate and find ourselves through the process of playing games.  It is also the longest piece of writing I have ever published, clocking in at over 6,500 words.  It is also the first piece of writing for which I took photos (the photos in question are of my old room at my mum’s house, which I have been clearing out over the past few months).

Aside from these minor formal experiments, the piece also marks something of a departure from my traditional critical stomping grounds and towards something a good deal more personal in that I try to use my thinking about games to shed some light on some thinking I have recently been doing about myself.  I’m not entirely sure how effective the experiment has been, but it was certainly an interesting experience trying something so different.

by Jonathan M

A Week In Film Purchasing

One of the reasons for this blog’s existence is to provide a place for me to work through the ideas that are cluttering up my head.  I do not write for any particular audience, I write for my own sake because otherwise I would not be able to get anything done.  One of the topics I frequently wrestle with is the ‘job’ of the critic.  Its ethics, its philosophical posture and its practicalities.  However, a good film critic is not only an analyst, he is also someone who has to have a feel for the film business.  An understanding of the realities of film-making.  Last week, I experienced something that addressed this much neglected practical side of ‘knowing about film’.

My brother runs a film distribution business in France and he was over in the UK in order to attend the London UK Film Focus event at the NFT on the Southbank.  London UK Film Focus is essentially a series of screenings over a few days with some hospitality and drinks receptions thrown in.  The idea being that while a buyer might not travel to London to see any of the particular films of offer, they might well travel to see a dozen or so films screened back to back.  LUFF, as some call it (presumably those who don’t know about the always amusing Lausanne Underground Film Festival) has a rather Spartan website that gives few clues about what is being shown because the event is aimed not at journalists, cinephiles and critics but at buyers.  A lot of the films at LUFF were receiving their first proper screenings anywhere, before they even appear on the festival circuit.

I was there in order to give my brother my ‘expert opinion’ on which films were worth checking out.  However, I think it’s fair to say that I got more out of it from my presence there than he did.

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