The  Word Simulacrum

I had an animated conversation in an Edinburgh howf during the recent Festival. I attempted to record this dialogue of feeling within the standard structure of the article/essay-but failed. I couldn’t capture the passion of the trio who were urgently conscious of themselves within the shifting self-consciousness of the new Scotland. Edinburgh, celebrated for its ‘respectable antiquity’ was the initial subject of the debate but quickly assumed a national context and so I have attempted to record (liberally) the imitation of the action as a scene from an on-going drama. Should a reader seek to extend the drama please feel free to continue the dialogue.

A: Simulacrum!

B: Whit?

C: You’ve lost us. Come on, don’t hide behind your damnable Edinburgh intellect.

A: Simulacrum! A great new word I found just the other day.

B: Found? You had lost it?

C: You found it where? At the book festival I bet.

A: No, no.  Get in another round and I’ll tell you.

B: Bloody Edinburgh intellectuals; selling understanding for a mess o drink. (Leaves to buy.)

C: The church I once knew, would call it a kind of simony... a political simony.

A: Look there are 5 million plus folk in Scotland. 5,000 have power ... 5 million powerless, the rest, like us talk, think, drink  and talk again.

B: Here! Don’t choke. What about the word?

A: Yes. The word.

C: In the beginning?

A: Far from it. Jean Paul Sartre used it in his introduction to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

B: Missed that at the tech.

C: (Whispers) I bet he missed it too, even with a fkn PHd from Edinburgh Uni!

A: Now now youngster.  But you are half right. We discussed Fanon, tangentially, I remember. Reading the radicals with intent was just not on (unless you were politically well connected like AD.) Dare to quote them in yon Thatcher days and you might be listed.

B:..or lifted.

C: Afro-Caribbean revolutionary psychiatrists were never on my reading list.

B: So why this Fanon noo?

A: He died 50 years ago this year, in 1961. He finished his Wretched of the Earth just months before he passed and Sartre agreed to publish it and wrote a preface.

C: He comes up now in post-colonial studies.

B: Handy noo? So what about the word?

A: These wee haufs in here barely wet the throat!

C:  Aye 25 mls. Edinburgh’s knickers!

B: Scotland! We export sae much there’s no enough left so we get this wee moose-pee!

A: Ah well. Cheers!

C: Do we get the sermon?

B:.. on the mound!

A: Context! We cheered at the massive popular vote in May for the SNP.

B: Substantial vote but...

A: Just 20,000 more in the right seats and we would have taken all!

C: Ok! That’s May. But what the hell is next? Do they know? Does Salmon have the plan?

B: I was a simple leaflet-giving, chapper-on-doors. But the punters inside and outside the party don’t have a clue as to what’s really next?

A: And they are right!

C: Soft devo-max or Hard-on Independence!

A: Much more. The party constitution has a definition; the white paper -the  Alec conversation document has another; the election manifesto had a third and there was another election document on Independence offering a fourth version.

C: I had a letter in the Herald way back in 2008 on ‘the enigmatic question of Scottish sovereignty’-when I almost believed.

A: And you don’t now?

C: It’s your round!

B: It’s the old process or finished product argument.

C: The focus has to be on the sovereignty idea! What does it really mean?

A: Political power and constitutional authority over our national life!

B: When the World bank, IMF and European banks run oor economy!

A: But we will have our own voice at the table articulating our vision!

B: Hoad on there...that’s drink talkin’ but!

A: Or, to begin at the beginning, we find a nationalist simulacrum posing as sovereignty.

B: What..that word again? That’s lack o drink talkin.

C: My mobile dictionary tells me....Simulacrum ... a mere pretence, a shadowy likeness, a deceptive substitute.

A: Right! That’s what we might have struggled for ...a shadowy likeness of independence.  Are we aware I mean you and you and yes me, are we aware that we belong to a subject people?

B: Yes!

C: Eh ... a bit much!

A: Then Fanon, fifty years on has something to tell us. Cut out his plea for violence.  But listen to his essential cultural argument that we need a consciousness of our own being as a people, with power in our own nation,  through an empowering culture that comes in advance of politics or even the economic process.

C: Strange ... I’m reading Edward  Said at the moment -his Culture & Imperialism has quite a bit to say to us, right here and now in our Scotland!

B: It has helped you to believe again?

C: I’m eh ....swithering.

A:  It is vital that we have a programme that will animate, stimulate  and create a popular  consciousness  on  the idea of sovereignty... the need for sovereignty and the reality of sovereignty!

C:  What Freire called conscientization...an  understanding for social action.

B: My sister has a drama group-Acting for Change...a Green.

A:  If we don’t provide the concrete vision... we will lose again!

B: We’re good at that!

C: We Scots are intuitive losers...my English mother used to say.

A: No! We can win this thing. But we need to define our nationalism...it cannie be a magic wand... it can’t be an excuse for failure to deal with powerlessness in Scotland; for not dealing with real economic hardship in places like north Lanarkshire or for ignoring injustice or for the creation of  new jock-nationalist governing bourgeoisie! We can’t swap an arrogant London Raj with an equally arrogant Edinburgh elite!

C: Powerful stuff!

B: You’re getting roused!

A: Aye! But we need thousands to get roused... assert  our political identity without chauvinism but with the vision of a genuine popular victory for liberal nationalism.

B: National liberation?

C: Ca’ cannie!

A: Well hundreds of countries have decoupled from London’s imperial hegemony...we are kind of late ...but..

B: Aye there’s that the guid Scots word of doubt... but.

A: No! But without simulacrum! Without the shadow...Whose round is it?

B&C: Yours!

(We will leave them ....for now.)

  

john Bellany

John Bellany: An appreciation 

I discovered art late in life (my 50^th birthday.) I was given a set of a paints, brushes and canvases and significantly two paintings by the celebrated Caribbean artist Ras Akyem (Ramsey). His dynamic use of colour and dramatic content captured my attention and led me on. That summer I travelled from the Caribbean to attend a summer course at Edinburgh School of Art.   I was asked what training I had and explained that I had taken some classes at the Jamaica School of Art twenty –years before.  Painting in the studio (some life studies) gave me time to look out the window and use colour.

One of the tutors asked me if I knew the work of John Bellany. While saying no she took me to the library and there in Edinburgh I discovered John Bellany artist.  What a revelation, what a memorable experience, what a significant act of education that has shaped my vision now for almost twenty years. For leading me towards Bellamy I am so grateful to that tutor whose name I’m afraid I have lost.

But it was in the work of John Bellany that I found both succour and inspiration. His power of paint and passionate use of colour is so thrilling and moving. But his ebullient colour doesn’t reduce   his quite awesome expression of feeling.  His feeling is in each brush stroke with an invigorating emotional relationship with his paint.  He is the artist that understood the pain in painting. He is the antithesis of Matisse writing in Notes on Painting:

“What I dream of  is an art of  purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, a soothing , calming influence on the mind, something like  a good arm chair, which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    With John Bellany the viewer is never offered a ‘good arm chair ‘.

 He has the Hugh MacDiarmid volcanic vigour:

‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur 
Extremes meet - it’s the only way I ken 
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt 
That damns the vast majority o’ men.

Indeed there is in ‘paragone’ the idea of poetry and art contending dialectically: sharing excellence and supremacy. Simonides of Ceos, the Greek lyric poet wrote, “the poem is a speaking picture, the painting mute poetry’

 Perhaps as Norman McCain suggested on the death of Grieve/MacDiarmid (let’s have three minutes of pandemonium) we should all bring brushes and paint and celebrate the work and life: the life of work; of John Bellany, pain-ter.

Thom Cross

Carluke

Scotland (it has been suggested/decided/refuted) may need to jump through several hoops in order to negotiate entry into the EU and other International bodies. (Then surely so would England, Wales and Northern Ireland as they too will become constitutionally a ‘new state’). International Law will flounder over this matter as it is primarily a political issue while International Law is (most of the time on matters of nation and state)  less than authoritive or even helpful. Much of what passes for international constitutional arrangements are through convention or political agreement.

What is required is a reading of historical constitutional conventions and practice and then from that understanding, look at the possible way forward for Scotland.

Scottish sovereignty in the historical context of a reading of important texts on the 'British constitution' (sic) creates innumerable legal conundrums and indeed legal fictions. We are minded to quote De Tocqueville who suggested that “ the English constitution has no real existence.”

The lead authority tends to be AV Dicey in his   INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE LAW OF THE CONSTITUTION (1885) who provides cultural insights into the wider academic thinking of the time when he writes in his prologue that his book deals with “two or three guiding principles which pervade the modern constitution of England'.  His text repeatedly refers to the ‘make up of the constitutional law of England’.

 He was not alone in his reading of the UK constitution as an English instrument; part law, part custom, part the work of ‘cunning lawyers’ and “political conventions rather than rules of law”. He offers other notable constitutionalists as in Bagehot’s ‘English Constitution’, Hearn’s ‘Government of England’, Gardiner’s ‘History of England’, Freeman’s  ‘The Growth of the English Constitution’ and of course Blackstone’s ‘Commentaries’ with his remarkable, “The King of England is therefore not only the chief but properly the sole magistrate of the nation, all others acting by commission from and in due subordination to him.” Dicey naturally refutes this with,” the executive of England (sic) is in fact placed in the hands of a committee called the Cabinet.”

Such is the foundation of British constitutional studies (amplified in Dicey's eighth edition of 1914 with references to Dominion law and the Imperial Parliament) with its narrow interpretation of constitutional law and what constitutes sovereignty.

Politically, Dicey quite vehemently opposed the entire Irish Home Rule initiative and urged delay in the granting of increased sovereignty to the Dominions of Canada , Australia and South Africa.

Dicey’s analysis and opinions were of course part and parcel of a discourse emanating  from a historical context in which it appeared that the vast horizons of the British Empire at its zenith (1880s-1914) was ruled by English law. Imperial Law was situated in its capital London and the centre of its power shared within a troika of Buckingham Palace, Westminster and Whitehall. For Dicey and his many colleagues the nation of England was the de facto state of the Empire given legitimacy by his erudition and history.

Scotland and its sources of power and influence meanwhile tacitly (some enthusiastically) agreed with this Unionist formulation as the benefits of the near 300 years of Imperial  expansion  and exploitation had provided Scotland’s elites  with capital, opportunities and a seat in the box-room of power.

It was the glorious idea of the Empire that attracted our betters in Scotland to initially accept the 1707 deal and then to send their sons and nephews to manage it (book- keeper it). They sought  out adventures of advancement in odd locations around the globe like Hong Kong, Afghanistan  and far away Australia.

 The 1707 treaty took off the shackles of ‘alien’ on Scots traders and merchants, permitting them to engage wholeheartedly in both the slave/sugar/tobacco- trades  and ( nastier) Asian adventures. The ever opportunist ‘jock-thampson and his bairns’ (jtbs) ignored the poet’s songs  of sovereignty , ignored Adam Smith’s  anti-imperial liberalism and ignored the indignity of having a de facto English constitution under which  they were ruled and did their ruling.

Weber’s nation as a ‘community of sentiment which would find its adequate expression only in a state of its own and which thus normally strives to create one’ could not, would not find expression while the Union Jack was being raised around the globe (often by Jtbs). The Barbadian novelist Austin Clark in his ‘Growing up Stupid Under the Union Jack’ argues that English imperialism hurt both the  colonised and the colonizer.

But now the Empire is over. Next year Scotland will celebrate (amongst other things) the hosting of at least 54 independent states (formerly parts of the Empire) in Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games. As well as the 54 who have gained sovereign statehood  (managed their own pensions and post-offices) there will be about 20 others (Scotland included) who have been accepted into the games without being full-state members of the Commonwealth . (International Law and political arrangements are ever  incongruous.)

It is within this new world of post-colonial/post-Soviet  realities of  new political cultures, redefining  sovereignties  reformulating  what  and who determines self-determination  that Scotland now finds itself . Scotland may have found release from the hegemony of the empire’s dreamscape but there is the new ‘imagined community’ of European authority.  But (the Glasgow word that speaks for all of us) Scotland can (post 2011) claim the political-legal legitimate authority to seek a new liberal shared sovereignty within Europe.

But (again) let us not fall into the historical romantic legalist fiction that sovereignty is wholly self-determined through a successful referendum. We live in a real world brought to us daily in vivid images (more often on Al Jazeerah rather than BBC) of a post-sovereign world in which drones navigated from Tampa Florida can strike across borders from Afghanistan to Timbuktu while many of our laws are now  printed in Brussels.

For let us not forget,  that sovereignty initially meaning the laws proclaimed by the sovereign (the crown) and then redefined by Dicey as the laws of Westminster  requires a fresh definition  in this  post-Diceyean post-sovereign globalized age.

 It is in this new post-sovereign political paradigm (articulated with great erudition by the late Sir Neil Mac Cormick) that Scotland must take the role of the lead actor in its own negotiated,  portioned political destiny. Scotland has enjoyed (the potential of) internal sovereignty with its self-defining constitutional and legal characteristics but too often (jtbs) have been willing to see that sovereignty denigrated. Now the challenge is to successfully realize both internal and external sovereignty and for this our constitutional education has to move beyond Dicey.

Might I suggest that we should begin with a popular examination of the work of the late patriot and political academic Sir Neil MacCormick.  In a passage from an essay he wrote for Scottish Affairs in 1995 ‘Sovereignty : Myth or Reality’ he gives us a sample of his  scholarly thinking (and wit) on the issue of  sovereignty:

‘The key question becomes whether there can be a loss of sovereignty at one

level without its inevitable and resultant re-creation at another. Is sovereignty

like property, that can be given up only when another gains it? Or should we

think of it more like virginity, that can be lost by one without another's

gaining it - and whose loss in apt circumstances is even a matter for

celebration? I take the latter view. I welcome the prospect of Europe beyond

sovereign statehood. The idea of subsidiarity points us to better visions of

democracy than all-purpose sovereignty ever did. There is a possible future

reality preferable to the past of nostalgic mythology.’

His birthday (soon upon us) should once again be publically celebrated.  Meanwhile his insightful understanding of Scotland and its rightful role in the new Europe  is  sorely missed.

The UK Government with London as its capital city and owning a subordinate UK-owned  family of  tax-havens (The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands,  Turks and Caicos, Jersey and the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man) sits  at the very heart of the global tax haven/tax avoidance scenario.   At the personal level it is deeply ironical that David Cameron  himself gained substantially from his (Scottish) father’s business acumen in creating a wealth management investment fund in the tax-free haven of Panama. Indeed it was Mrs Thatcher’s policy of ‘freeing capital’ that encouraged the export of wealth while allowing companies to use the competitive market of  international low-tax regimes in order to set up off-shore business accounts, off-shore sales corporations and banks.

Thus the Herald is correct to point out that “TAX avoidance will top the agenda of the G8 summit which begins today at Lough Erne in County Fermanagh.” (Taxing times for the G8 Monday June 17^th.)

The Ulster venue has a certain historical propinquity in that the great 18^th Century Scottish Enlightenment scholar and moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, Principal of Glasgow University came from the area that now hosts this conference.   For surely at the very heart of this meeting of the G8 should be a concern for some fundamental analysis of the near moral collapse within the global business world. One of Hutcheson’s students, Adam Smith,  warned of this moral bankruptcy in his Wealth of Nations  when he railed against  “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind….. All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

Smith’s “masters of mankind” have much to ponder over in order to produce meaningful actions for change.  Hutcheson and Smith both argued for ‘natural rights and a morality of enterprise…  such as are not hurtful to others in their persons or their goods ’.

I am not confident that this or any G8 meeting of ‘old empires’ include the necessary moral attributes in order to make any substantial difference for the betterment of mankind.

The Herald editorial is concerned with ‘how complicated a business it would be to disentangle the government of Scotland from that of the rest of the UK.’ (Thursday May 30th.)

 In a strange piece of historical serendipity 300 years ago (today), June 1st  1713, the Earl of Seafield made a motion in the House of Lords ‘that represented the grievances of the Scotch nation’. The motion concluded ;

‘That since the Union between the two nations had not those good effect as were expected and hoped for from it, he therefore moved that leave might be given to bring in a bill for dissolving the said Union’.

In the debate that followed there is an eerie echo of current discourse with much discussion on the impracticality in the dissolving of the union.

The Earl of Peterborough remarked that the Union should be compared to a marriage and ‘that though sometimes there happened a difference between man and wife yet it did not presently break the marriage.  Since in like manner, though England must be supposed to be the husband might, in some instances having been unkind to the Lady yet she ought not presently sue for divorce.’ He concluded with a currently familiar argument that ‘ the Scots as a people could never be satisfied; that they would have all the advantages of being united to England but would pay nothing; and that they had more money from England than all their estates amounted to in their own country’.

 The Duke of Argyle in a moving speech accepted the fact that he had supported the Union but he now ‘believed in his conscience it was as much an interest of England as of Scotland to have it dissolved’.  Should the much hated malt-tax be implemented in Scotland ‘it must be done by a regiment of dragoons’.

Other arguments of a topical nature included ‘ that it might easily be proved that it were better when they were asunder , than when together and for that reason if the Union were  dissolved again the two nations would be like  to be better friends’. Though many peers felt that it was impracticable to dissolve the union, an English peer, the Earl of Nottingham stated that ‘if they had power to make it, they certainly had power to dissolve it.’ He concluded ‘since the Scots who were the best judges of the affairs of their kingdom found that it did not answer the needs proposed, he was for dissolving it’.

 A nameless ‘Scotch lord’ railed that ‘if the Union were not dissolved their country would be the most miserable under heaven’.

The question was put on the Earl of Finlater’s motion with 54 votes for each side but with 17 proxies against and 13 for the affirmative, the motion to dissolve was defeated by just 4 proxy votes.  

Syria

Here we go again: Iraq 2. It's Tony Blair’s fault. Having fooled me into believing that Sadam could deploy bombs with chemical weapons in 45 minutes, now  I  will not believe Western politicians who declare that the 'new Sadam', Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his people. Now we hear fresh war drums from Washington and Westminster again on the flimsy caprice of ‘not proven’ evidence. The UN inspectors have gone in to discover if chemical weapons were used; not to declare who used them.
Her are some questions with ‘a spokesperson’s’ answers. 
Q: Why would Assad want to / need to use such weapons? 
A: He has no need to use them. As long as Syria retains the support of Russia, China and Iran he cannot be defeated. 
Q: How does he lose their support?
A: He uses chemical weapons. So it is not in Syria’s interest to use chemical weapons.

Q: How can the opposition forces win? 
A: Use the Libyan methodology i.e. harness western military forces (mainly from the air) to bomb an entrenched regime.
Q: So who did use chemical weapons? The opposition? 
A: The opposition is fractured and weak. They need help. They can only win with overt support from western military forces. They know that; the West knows that; Israel, the major player in the region knows that.
Q: How can the opposition get that support? 
A: If chemical weapons can be found to have been used.
Q: So how were they used? 
A: Covert forces with certain elements of the opposition could use state-owned chemical weapons in secret ‘black-ops’ activity. This would create the necessary conditions for military intervention. But would place the blame on Assad!

Q: Who would manage the covert activity?

A: There are several sources with form in’ black-ops’ dirty warfare in this region. There are the obvious international actors but at the same time there are sources within Syria that could be hired to create the necessary conditions for intervention. What we are seeing in Syria is classic covert activity ‘dirty warfare’ in order that the west can produce regime change in Syria. Parliament will once again be asked to walk through the war lobby and operate   against the interests of the people who voted for them in a damned display of dirty democracy.

The Scottish commercial media within the referendum will play its sleekit/ negative/  blatant oppositional role: we know that. That is why the cyber-media is so vital in the democratizing of the campaign, where power from the bottom –up can overcome the hegemony of ‘bitter the gither’ in the print media and the BBC.  Of great concern therefore are the recent revelations of the manipulation  and corruption of the cyber-sphere   by state-agencies  across the globe.  Just look at the power of the US owned cyber- giants!

Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, Cisco, EBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Intel, Logitech,  Mac, MacAfee, Memorex, Microsoft, Netflix, Netscape, Oracle, Palm, PayPal, San Disk, Skype,  Stumble-upon, Symantec, TiVo, Yahoo, You-tube

When last did you use one of these US owned increasingly ubiquitous global cyber-technologies? Just now? How much of the detailed policy- making, strategies and political intelligence around the Scottish Referendum campaign is being communicated using these digital services?  Are they weapons of mass deception?

Make no mistake, illegal or illegitimate use of cyber-power to steal or capture domestic information by both state and commercial interests is a drone-like attack at  the heart of our democracy   

I would suggest that the near monopoly power of US based cyberspace technologies gives Washington as much global cultural power as their combined defence industry and military. This hegemony of  cyber-power comes embedded with ideological assumptions in a near global dominance in defence of what is euphemistically declared ‘US interests’.

  Now we hear that some of these cyber-giants are providing, in fact selling, surveillance services to the US Government.  We are being permitted to understand more of the sheer illegitimate power of Government agencies to pry, spy and ‘hoover-up’ information, from the most recent insider, Edward Snowden. He is the latest in a series of whistleblowers angered by the corrupting utilization of private and domestic communications for sinister state purposes.

The sheer global ubiquitous presence of  communication cyber-technologies (as well as Sim-card based mobile-telephony) offers the far more potent potential of manipulating not just national sources of news and information but indeed dictating global communications and managing global information gathering.  

This power to collect , collate and store  the ideas expressed by millions of individuals and to use that information for  political, economic, military, financial, intelligence, marketing, cultural, commercial  and illicit power manipulation is quite frankly frightening

.

But let us tighten the lens and bring this cyber-imperialism closer to home.  There is absolutely no doubt that with the YES campaign strategically committed to driving the referendum campaign    through information cyber-technologies (See The Herald Saturday 21^st July) much of the more discreet, sensitive and indeed secret info will ultimately be accessed by state intelligence sources.

 We must accept that the NO campaign’s political-propaganda action people will acquire this captured information.  We can of course attempt to take appropriate counter measures. But the very plural nature of the YES campaign with its multi-agency/party points of contact, spread across many diverse groups, using multi-platform technologies, leaves it exposed in the intelligence gathering cyber war.

But this ubiquitous cyber-tech can be harnessed  by popular organs of communication  as modes of cyber-resistance and digital - led counter-propaganda.   Otherwise our democracy is in peril.    Social media activists are alive to the enormous potential of thousands of sources of light within the dark dreich, fear and crabbit negation of the NO lobby.

Those who seek  a new vision, for a new Scotland must be confidant in, yet conscious of,  the power of  the new technology  to engage  the dynamic  of  the many cyber-voices  in this mass struggle  of  2014.  The campaign urgently needs the energy, resources and popular power of the cyber-warriors.