For the new year

"I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year - what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

'Yass yes yes...' he said, rubbing his belly.

'Segregation? Not since 1994...'

My father and I gave a lift to two men who work at the house where we were staying. We took them to their home, a township 30 miles outside Bloemfontein called Botshabelo.
Sam and Willem, father and son, tend the vegetables in addition to working for a furniture restoration business. They are employed by my step-mother's father, an imposing man who on first impression bears out Nietzsche's claim that "anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties." He is, on the contrary, however, a complex and interesting man who overflows with generosity, hypnotic power, and booming laughter.

On arrival at Sam's house, he introduced us to his wife, and showed us around. It was hot, since there was no ceiling - only an asbestos roof; but the house did have electricity and running water, which is something of an advancement.
Botshabelo, we discovered, is a town of its own, with a shopping centre and different districts. Two things distinguish it from any 'normal' town - there are not street and area names, but codes made up of numbers and letters (Sam's home is in K section). Secondly, in the hour and a half that we spent there, I saw only one white person, a farmer driving in his car.
The apartheid planners left quite a legacy. Botshabelo, which began as a settlement for those forcibly removed from more rural areas, is too far from Bloemfontein to attract anyone else to live there. In the 'new' South Africa, it is (slightly) more possible for black men and women to lift themselves out of township poverty, but there seems to be little likelihood that a town such as Botshabelo ever develops into a vibrant and diverse place to live. This is very unfortunate, since it has a certain good character. As is the way in this wretched country however, my father and I were warned not to get out of the car, lest the 'dark hordes' have their way with us. Foolish nonsense! (which, I am coming to realize, is not so harmless as all that.)
After unloading Sam's bags, we headed over to meet his brother, who runs a small liquor store from his house. He invited us into his living room for a beer (in fact, we initially invited ourselves, because of a mix up which involved my father mistakenly thinking we were in an illegal drinking establishment). Nonetheless, we all sat down and talked, about local football (Kaizer Chiefs is the name of a club as well as a band) and morogo, a food made from potato and spinach.

Bloemfontein

My South African odyssey has taken me to Bloemfontein, a large town in Free State province. It is a relaxing place for me, because I do not know it well, and it does not know me well. I am freed from the wealthy middle-class rut of my home town.
Yesterday afternoon, I took a long walk on the wide, dry boulevards. I had been given directions, but I decided this time to get the 'conditions of possibility' to work for me. It is a condition of possibility of a planned walk that the route be deviated from (if this were not the case, it would mean that I could walk in any direction and still get home). Deviate I did, into some rather rundown districts; you know you are getting to the interesting parts of a town when sex-shops begin to appear. I saw very poor white men, an unusual experience even now. They have very tanned skin, which contrasts with their sun-bleached blonde hair. There is a broken look in their eyes.

Stumbling along the hard shoulder, I found a chess piece in the gutter - a rook, or castle. The castle symbolizes Bloemfontein well. The white, afrikaans speaking community here is a bastion of the old values of apartheid. This is a place where men are men, women are not much at all, and body-building supplements have a prominent place in every supermarket. On the other hand, black Sotho-speakers make up 90% of the population here, and since the fall of the old regime, they have come to occupy almost all the important regional government posts. A castle, we may note, doesn't change hands by degree - it is held either totally, or not at all.

Ants

I see two ants crawling - walking - towards one another. They meet and pause for a few moments, perhaps slightly longer than usual. How do I interpret, or understand, this?
Were I to see two humans meet, I would speculate about whether they know each other, are old friends, etc, depending on how long they remain together (if they are too distant to for me to see gestures and hear voices). With the ants, I cannot posit any self-awareness. Even if the ant has some sort of information, or message, to convey, I must think of this in purely functionalist terms. The ant has not been given a task - rather, this is simply something that ants do. And this in turn must be conceived instinctually. Can we make an analogy with breathing, or the beating of the heart? Or would this conception force us to consider an ant colony as a single organism (and if so, what is the problem with this)?

Report from South Africa III: the long goodbye

Leaving my house in Coventry at 3am presented two main dangers: rain, and drunken revellers. Rain threatened, and drunken revellers impressed me with their cogency.

"What are you doing with a suitcase at this time of night?" asked a girl, who felt that I was more interesting than the argument that she was having with her boyfriend. Before I could respond, she squealed "you're getting married, aren't you?!"
Smiling no, I withdrew.

Report from South Africa II: the good old days

To atone for my previous post - an ill tempered diatribe - I present a selection of 'humourous' excerpts from apartheid discourse.

We do not believe that the Native is really a communist at heart. He is not able to form a conception of the ideology and of the dialectical materialism of their doctrine. - Dr N Diederichs, House of Assembly, 1948.

A large proportion of your Natives today are still savages, others are semi-civilized, others are more or less civilized. - Minister of Justice, 1959.

In the past the torch of civilization had been kept burning in the country because "among other things our forefathers were such good shots." - Minister of Defence, 1961.

Mata Buela, 36, was fined R30 (or two months) this week, for stealing a banana. The value of the banana was placed at one cent. It was his first conviction. - Newspaper report, 1961.

At least ten people have now died in Mamelodi since yesterday morning, according to unconfirmed reports. The figure is expected to rise after police have completed their investigations. - Newpaper report, 1985.

A 13-year-old African babysitter appeared in court on a charge of assault because he hugged a white child in his charge. He had knelt down and opened his arms, and the little girl had run to him and they had hugged. - Newspaper report, 1985.

I don't think I need add anything to this, except perhaps the words "scott free?"

Report from South Africa I: Hegel

I am on holiday in Cape Town. I should like to say one or two things about what we might call the 'situation' here. That is not to say, the political situation. Rather, the situation in general.

I am already fed up with the tiresome fawning of people working in the service industry. Buying a coffee, for example, feels more like an encounter with some deluded supplicant: the customer is a deity, whose every wish is granted. The waiter/shop assistant clings to the customer like a cheap suit.

This creates a rather problematic relationship, which Hegel understood particularly well. People here - South Africa - expect to be treated like royalty when in a shop or restaurant. Staff duly oblige ('you are dispensable - there are ten people who would happily take your place here'). But we cannot help but ask: what kind of esteem is this?
'I am a king - see how they treat me!'
The 'they' is elusive, like Hegel's subhuman slave.
Who could truly value the worship of these coerced, subservient wretches? Only a bunch of deluded fools. The kind of deluded fools who could convince themselves that apartheid is right and good, perhaps? Well, we needn't go that far. Yet.

The spirit of apartheid is still very much alive. I must emphasize, however, that I am not only talking about black service staff. The same lamentable self-abasement is demonstrated by white student jobbers, and shopkeepers.
The petty desire for wielding power over others, which was a condition of possibility for apartheid, is now satisfied by our 'legitimate' capitalist regime.
'I don't care whether he is black or white - I want him to lick my boots because I have paid for the privilege!'

Rousing rhetoric or messianic twaddle?

'Gentlemen' he said,
I don't need your organisation,
I've shined your shoes,
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards,
But Eden is burning,
Either get ready for elimination,
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.

nnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnn- Bob Dylan, Changing of the Guards

Dogmat circulates

O end of term dilemmas! Which party to go to? In the final analysis, I chose the path of least resistance: Matches' birthday bash. I gave him a rather fetching old copy of short stories by Bertrand Russell, a suitable gift for the continentally challenged.

After a thoroughly useless Saturday, I thought that a quiet spot of red tea would do the world of good. And it did. I had a few interesting talks with people. My opening gambit of the evening was "if you had to choose between a person getting killed, or the Mona Lisa being destroyed, which would you go for?" This was a discussion that I had been having during the day, with Lila, Axel, and, later, Brn. Does it sound like a piece of philosophical impoverishment? Yes, well, ole Danny Dennett talks about it somewhere in one of his popular science works (the book just happened to fall open on this - obviously well thumbed - page while Axel was perusing it), and it certainly has all the hallmarks of an irritating Anglo-Saxon thought experiment. And yet...

I also had the good luck to chat to a Norwegian physics student, who gracefully explained what Wave-Particle Duality means, why the sky is blue, what a quantum computer can do (and why), and how a hologram works. What's more, he enjoyed it, unlike the last physics student I happened upon at a party, whom I coerced into explaining the theory of relativity, with diagrams, equations - the works.

As nights draw in, academic gossip intensifies. Glueboot emailed me the other day, to tell me that our new VC (who'll be replacing Marty Vanderpoot) has written on Deleuze and Virilio. Maybe we can wonder how much he can have learnt from these thinkers considering that he is now an administrative bigwig, but maybe that isn't necessary - it is good news all the same.
I also heard a piece of broken telephone speculation which seems so unbelievable that it would be irresponsible to reproduce it here...
A Baudrillardian friend told me that he was told that Professor Elusive-Hyphen wrote an email to every member of our philosophy department saying simply: "If you want all the Continental philosophers to leave, just say so."
Even if this tale isn't true, or has been distorted beyond recognition, I want to believe it. I find it comforting to know that at least one of my teachers has some cojones. Dammit!

Later, I had been trying to describe the difference between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to a Wittgensteinian pal, when we were interrupted by someone drunkenly frolicking.
When we resumed our discussion, he said: "What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, Wittgenstein..."
No, we were actually talking about phenomenology you fuckwit.

Hup hup. Forty-two! Sixty-seven! Go long!

American Football is such a strange sport. Like the way that the game is broken up endlessly, and the time between plays filled with studio analysts' inane drivel. They waffle about taxicab problems, or how much money they have bet on the game. When they think that play is about to begin, they cross over to the US commentators, who are picked up mid-sentence, so all the viewer hears is gruff laughter followed by "that's right John..., now back to the action."
And they say cricket is odd.

Google Maps

What an innovation - here is an image of the neighbourhood where I grew up (my house is in the centre). And note that it is possible to zoom-in still further, for extreme detail.

You know you are bored when...

...you try to temper tinfoil on the stove, whilst waiting for the coffee pot to boil.

Arbeit Macht Frei

More unusual days. I was with S is some sort of postgraduate room near the philosophy department. What began as a little look at the Goebbels Diaries (which happened to be on the shelf), ended up as an investigation into Prussian Blue, a rather fascinating white-supremacist pop duo. Following up links, we stumbled around in neo-Nazi blogs, which are quite nasty but very difficult to take seriously. There was the charming young blogger named simply fraulein, who listed as her dislikes "gays and mix people" (sic). An honest, but shamefaced lad described his hair colour as "umm, brown". He won't be given an easy ride, that's for sure.
At least some bloggers were still trying to keep something of an open mind. One chap listed as his favourite books Mein Kampf and 100 Years of Solitude. Now I reckon only one of those is on the KKK bestseller list.

After that madness I went to a rather good concert with M and Lila. This was an unfortunate turn of events for my housemate, Axel, who had mistakenly locked himself in the lounge at home. When Lila and I returned to the house later that night, we found him stoically settled on the couch, watching DVDs. Poor poor boy.