Is the Real Crime of Political Bloggers Making Fun of the Powerful?

The Trabant was the regular butt of jokes in East Germany.

 Foto: Z1021 Peter Endig/ dpa

Posted by Martin Cohen

Last week saw a commercial jet effectively hijacked and diverted to the capital of Belarus on the orders of its dictatorial leader, Alexander Lukashenko, the only person to ever serve as president of this sad country. Elections were held in 1994, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020. They might as well not have been.

Roman Protasevich, the blogger at the centre of the Belarus plane hijack, had provoked the fury of Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko. The Western media said it was for facilitating protests in the country, and in so doing to some extent endorsed the paranoid thinking of Lukashenko.  On the contrary, I suspect if all he had done was poke fun at the dictator, he would still have been a target. Because dictators have no sense of humour at all.

At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberalization of Russia and Eastern Europe, it seemed that political jokes had become interesting, yet nowadays under not only Lukashenko but his puppet-master, Vladimir Putin, political jokes are once again gaining popularity. So let's take a quick look at the role of humour as the sole survivor of authoritarianism. 

If the Cold War officially ended a long time ago, in the world of jokes, stereotypes hang on and so many play on Putin’s KGB background, such as this one in which Stalin’s ghost appears to Putin in a dream. Of course, Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, ‘Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue.’ ‘Why blue?’ Putin asks. ‘Ha!’ says Stalin. ‘I knew you wouldn’t ask me about the first part.’ 

Another subversive barb, offers a man who is reported to have said: ‘Putin is a moron!’ and has been arrested by a Russian policeman. ‘No, sir, I meant not our respected leader, but another `Putin!’ he protests. ‘Don’t try to trick me’ snaps back the police man, ‘If you say ‘moron’, you are obviously referring to our President!’ Russians like jokes which play with the ‘referents’ of words, as philosophers might say. 

Another slightly more sophisticated version runs like this.

During the Second World War, a secretary is standing outside the Kremlin as Marshal Zhukov, the most important Russian general in World War Two, leaves a meeting with Stalin, and she hears him muttering under his breath, ‘Mustachioed idiot!’. She immediately rushes in to see Stalin and breathlessly reports, ‘I just heard Zhukov say ‘ Mustachioed idiot!’ Stalin dismisses the secretary and sends for Zhukov, who comes back in. ‘And just who did you have in mind with this talk of “Mustachioed idiots”!?’ asks Stalin. ‘Why, Adolf Hitler, of course!’ Satisfied, Stalin thanks him, dismisses him, calls the secretary back and explains what the Marshal had said. ‘And now, who did you think he was talking about?’

You have to laugh at this joke, with its deeply sinister undertones. And in addition there is an element of ‘just desserts’ in the informer-secretary’s predicament.

But back to ‘real life’ and when Vladimir Putin was elected President, in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill ‘Kukly,’ a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a ‘magic TV comb’ to bewitch a city - a humorous reworking of a German folktale in which a fairy casts a spell on an ugly dwarf so that others find him irresistibly beautiful.. Putin’s predecessor, Mr. Yeltsin, put up for years with the satirical barbs of the TV puppet, and even intervened when officials talked of prosecuting the makers of the show, NTV. But media management meant something rather different to Mr Yeltsin’s KGB-trained protégé. Putin simply threatened to shut down the channel unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, ‘Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.’’

The fact is, President Putin himself doesn’t ‘do’ jokes, at least not in the funny sense. He once remarked to a child, ‘Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere’—before adding, ‘That’s a joke.’

Perhaps President Putin would have allowed this joke though. It starts with the scene of two friends walking down a street. One asks the other ‘What do you think of the President?’ ‘I can’t tell you here,’ he replies. ‘Follow me.’ They disappear down a side street. ‘Now tell me what you think of the President,’ says the friend. ‘No, not here,’ says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. ‘OK here then.’ ‘No, not here. It’s not safe.’ They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. ‘OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president.’ ‘Well,’ says the other, looking around nervously, ‘actually I quite admire him.’

A New Theory of Language

by Thomas Scarborough

The way that we use language does not fit with the way that we theorise about it.  Linguistics professor Michael Losonsky writes, ‘Language as human activity and language as system remain distinct focal points despite various attempts to develop a unified view.’

I have been shaping a manuscript, in which linguistic observations play a major role.  Friends have encouraged me to describe a complete theory of language.  Naturally, it can only be done too briefly in 700 words. 

Language, as we know it, is assembled from a range of basic elements: morphemes, words, phrases, and so on.  These we arrange according to certain rules: semantic, syntactic, morphological and more.  Language, therefore, is seen as a constructive enterprise.  

Take a simple example, ‘This city is green.’  

‘This city’ is the subject.

‘is green’ is the predicate, which completes an idea about the subject.

‘This’ is a determiner—which identifies this particular city. 

‘is’ is the verb—which, among other things, points back to the subject.

We assemble these pieces, then, to produce a meaningful communication with another language user, or users.  This is the standard view.

I propose that language is quite the opposite.  Rather than beginning with basic elements, with which we assemble the ideas we communicate, language begins with the whole world.  The function of language then is to begin with this whole, and reduce it. 

Again, the simple example, ‘This city is green.’ 

‘City’ greatly reduces the whole, now encircling only cities.

‘This’ narrows these cities to one particular city.

‘green’ narrows it to just one aspect of one city.

‘is’ reduces the time window to the present.

In fact, we may note that we do much the same with the scientific method.  The scientific method minimises unwanted influences on independent variables.  It begins with the whole world, then screens things out until only independent variables are left, undisturbed by outside influences. 

A holistic view of language should have various consequences, if it is true.  There are certain things we would expect to ensue.  Here are just a few: 

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, even as we reduce it, our words will retain some involvement in the whole.  This, in fact, is the case.  In the words of the philosopher Max Black, our words 'trail clouds of implication'.  

• Since our language reduces the whole, we may expect to run into problems which one associates with partial views. Everything we put into words, because it is reduced, will overlook critical aspects of the world. The statistician George Box put it simply, ‘All models (which are reductions) are wrong, but some are useful.’

• Language originates in the whole, therefore no part of the whole can be focal. A holistic view of language will exclude origins or central ideas -- at least as a valid means of establishing truth.  We shall avoid all such schemes as, in the words of Jacques Derrida, 'return to an origin'.

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, the rules of language -- semantics, syntax, inflections, and so on -- will represent a tool by which we efficiently reduce the whole. Since there are various methods of reduction, we would expect that there would be various grammars. This, too, is the case. In the words of Max Black, ‘Grammar has no essence.'

• Since both ordinary language and science represent a reduction of the world, we would expect them both to work in the same way.  This should enable us to unite our ordinary language and science.  In fact, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin notes that, both in the common affairs of life and in our scientific pursuits, 'we use similar patterns of thought'. 

• The scientific method, being a reduction of the whole, would be tested not primarily by falsification within its own bounds, but by something I shall call ‘invalidation’ in the context of the whole.  The success of science (or otherwise) would be assessed within the context of the whole. 

• Different cultures have different physical and social worlds in their minds.  As they reduce this whole through language, it seems impossible that they could say anything partial which would contradict the whole.  Therefore even snippets of one's language will be a reflection of one's outlook on the world. 

On ‘Conceptual Art’: Where Ideas Eclipse Aesthetics

Fifteen Plaster Surrogates,

Allan McCollum

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

The influential French artist Marcel Duchamp once said, ‘I was interested in ideas — not merely in visual products’. As he put it, work ‘in the service of the mind’, not mere ‘retinal’ art intended to gratify visually. In this manner, conceptual art disrupted the art establishment’s long-held traditional expectation of artist as original creator of handmade objects: a painting, drawing, sculpture, or other. Normalised expectations about the roles of artist, art, observer, display venue, and society in conceptual art are defied; boundaries are both blurred and expandable.

 

To the point of ideas-centric artistic expression, the presence of agency and intentionality are all the more essential. The aim is to shift the artist’s focal point away from ‘making something from scratch’ to ‘manipulating the already-manufactured’. Hence the absence of the conceptual artist manipulating the raw materials that we might expect artists to conventionally use, like paint, stone, glass, clay, metal, fabric, wood, and so forth. 

Duchamp is regarded as the pioneer and inspiration of conceptual art, whose early-twentieth-century foray in the field included a signed urinal, titled ‘Fountain’. It was a classic example of the avant-garde nature of this art form. Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, as they got to be called, became a fixture of conceptual art, up to the present day: where artists select, modify, and position ordinary, everyday manufactured objects as thought-provoking artistic expression. An art of the intellect, where objects are ancillary to concepts.

The heart of ‘conceptual art’ is ideas, inquiry, and intellectual deliberation rather than traditional beauty or aesthetic gratification. The objective is to urge observers to reflect cerebrally on the experience. Conceptual art can thus be seen as sharing a bond with other fields, like philosophy and the social sciences. But what does all that mean in practice? 

The central aspiration to spur observers to reflect upon ideas — not to engage exclusively in the ‘retinal’ experience mentioned above — necessitates such agency. The overriding objective of the conceptual artist’s intention is to focus on ‘meaning’ (something with high information content) rather than on the illustration of a scene that’s directed more traditionally toward triggering the senses (something with high experiential content). Art where, as Aristotle once put it, the ‘inward significance of things’ governs.

 

The meaning that the observer takes away from interaction with the art may be solely the observer’s own, or the artist’s, or the professional art critic’s, or the museum’s, or a hybrid of those, depending on how motivated the observer is. Either way, the art and the ideas conjured by it are linked. Conceptual art thereby sees its commission as philosophical, not just another commodity. Notable to this point, all artworks, including conceptual artworks, are created within a social and cultural context. This context exerts influence in defining and nourishing whatever philosophical theories the artwork is intended to convey.

 

What conceptual art underscores, then, is that no single core definition of all art applies to it. Even within any one category or movement of art, attempts to define it authoritatively can prove thorny: Examples of artwork, and the artists’ intent, may be quite dissimilar. Definitions, beyond generalizations, may be fuzzy at best; opinions about what does or doesn’t fit within the category may prove fractious. Conceptual art only magnifies these realities about attempts to craft a universal definition. 

 

A distinguishing factor is that this kind of art rests not only in its provocative appeal to the intellect, but sometimes even more directly to issues that strike at the heart of social and political displeasure. Or perhaps a little less adversarial, the artist’s unapologetic desire to disruptively probe cultural values and norms. Yet, that’s not to say other visual art movements, including those whose primary tradition is aesthetics, don’t have cognitive, socio-political, or cultural appeal too, for some clearly do. 

 

Indeed, one reward we seek from the experience of art broadly is not only to derive aesthetic joy (a matter of taste), but also to incite thought and to better understand the world and ourselves (a matter of judgment and rationalism). There is philosophical history to this view: Immanuel Kant, for example, also differentiated between aesthetic and logical judgment. To aim for the resulting understanding, the interpretation of conceptual artwork may result in sundry appropriate explanations of the art, or a single best explanation with others ranked in order behind it.

 

One thing in particular that we might praise about conceptual art is its unorthodox interpretation of, and verdict on, societal, cultural norms — quite often, rebelling against our philosophical keystones. In this way, conceptual art’s zealous pioneering temperament forces us to rethink the world we have constructed for ourselves.

 

If enlightenment arises from those second-guesses, then conceptual art has met its objective. And if, beyond illumination, action arises to yield social or cultural change, then that is all the better – in the eye of the conceptual artist.

 

Super League Self Defeat

Posted by Allister Marran

Picture credit: Dan Leydon, The Beautiful Game.

The current Super League debacle is simply a good example of how modern capitalism destroys humanity and innovation in exchange for pure greed.

There is an investor in Japan who owns one share of Nintendo stocks, and every year he goes to the shareholder meeting and asks the dumbest of questions, always relating to something like, "Why don't Nintendo start making and selling X?” (replace X with dog food, or electric cars, or anything that is selling well) which will make the company more profits.

The Japanese, as courteous and likeable fellows that they are, always answer the same way, "We are a games company at heart. We make games that make people happy. It's about the fans, not the shareholders."

Many games and technology companies have come and gone, because they followed the Western model of profits and return on investment over customer experience. Atari, Sega, Intellevision, Colecovision, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Amstrad, the list is endless.

A small business owner exists to service the needs of a customer base. He puts his name and face to a product, and his personal integrity attracts new clients. 

A large listed corporate company insulates its investors from any liability, responsibility, personal association or any other kind of accountability. As a result, many people don't even know what companies they invested in when they modified their share portfolio. For all they know, they could have shares in a company that dumps nuclear waste into the water of an orphanage for needy children. They don't need to know or care, as long as they make money.

Manchester United were the richest sports club in the world until a takeover by the Americans a few years ago. Those investors did not use much of their own money, but took out loans and investment money and leveraged it back to the team. 

Overnight the club went from kings to paupers, owing hundreds of millions to banks and struggling to make loan and interest repayments, whilst disbursing any profits in the form of dividends and cash payouts to the shareholders who invested little in the first place.

Football is the game of the people. It is owned by the people. FIFA represents their interests, as small, poor local clubs vote for committees that vote for regional representatives that vote for national representatives who sit on the body of FIFA. They have their own issues, but they represent the small boy without shoes in a small township in Brazil who owns an old ball and a dream of playing for his country and winning a world cup.

The Super League is the very worst of corporate greed, return on investment and unaccountable capitalism ruining another important business sector. It removes the fans from the game, and funnels profits from FIFA who are supporting grass roots efforts to find the next Pele or Messi or Bale or Mane, and redirects them to the disinterested ultra rich in the USA or Dubai or the Far East. People who don't care about soccer, who don't watch the game on Saturday or Sunday, who don't buy the merchandise, or know the words to the team song.

It could be argued that Nintendo, the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company, are still around because they continue to tell that one shareholder that the fans are more important than the profits. It's a bad strategy for annual ROI and dividends, but clearly great for long term sustainability and output. It allows them to plan for the bad times, when game machines start their cycle of decline before new technology renews it. 

I hope the fans of the English Big Six are ready to demand the same of their fat cat owners. 

Atari, Mattel, Intellevision, Commodore, IBM and many others were the big players in the games industry in the 80s, and for all intents and purposes they are gone today. Nobody believed they could fail, but they did not listen to the demands of the market and fell to smaller, nimbler, more attuned competition.

There is a chance that the same will happen to the Liverpools, Manchester Uniteds, and Chelseas of the world. No company is too big to fail. It is a lesson history has taught us over and over again. The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich put it radically: “The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.” But ruthlessness eats its own.

“You Will Never Walk Alone" are the words any Liverpool fan lives by. But trust is a two way street. Football is more than a business. Let us hope we are not left deserted on the roadside on our journey.  

Picture Post #63: The Audience

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

Girl Dancing In Front Of Her Teddy Bear. Paris, 1961

I like this image. Obviously, it's gentle, charming, and fun too. But beyond that, there is a touch of magic, in that the little girl is dancing, yes, but the bear is watching and waving. The bear becomes the active element in the composition, the girl a mere puppet, seemingly held up by invisible strings.

Not that it matters, I think it is a still from the film Gigot, that was set in Paris, so that's where this dance takes place and it was directed by Gene Kelly. However, the little girl – Nicole, in the film – is played by Diane Gardner. I believe this was her starring role!