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[poetix]

I think it's definitely true to say that Mario 64 is structured as a spiritual quest which takes place within a magical universe, although I think the echoes of alchemical and other esoteric traditions are largely incidental, just the outcome of fishing around eclectically in the myth-kitty. I liked however the observation about lots of games having a "pirate level" (Banjo Kazooie does, for instance).

Mario's universe (in the earlier games as well) has two topologies, the regular Euclidean topology that you move through by running and jumping, and the weird wormhole topology where you travel through pipes or paintings or just by looking up into the light and are transported instantly from point to point within a larger map. There's something hugely imaginatively suggestive about that.

 

[IdleRich]

I think it's definitely true to say that Mario 64 is structured as a spiritual quest which takes place within a magical universe, although I think the echoes of alchemical and other esoteric traditions are largely incidental, just the outcome of fishing around eclectically in the myth-kitty

Yeah, that article is a bit "Here Mario enters a building - Freemasons also go inside buildings!"

 

[luka]

Well sure that's part of the fun of the thing. Great comment about the two topologies.

 

[IdleRich]

It was fun for a while but I couldn't make it to the end. Shame cos some points were well made.

 

[Mr. Tea]

"Your the real fascists!" etc etc

I think "People criticising/opposing fascism are the real fascists!" has become the standard calling-card of these people, even more than "I'm not racist, but..." or "I'm telling truths you're too scared to face."

It's particularly crazy among the far right in America, who are always falling over themselves to paint the left as "fascists", while simultaneously bleating "Hitler was a socialist!" because the 'S' in 'NSDAP' stood for 'Socialist'.

 

[poetix]

I mean one basically trips over one's own laces the moment one associates fascism to "authoritarian suppression of difference" without further qualification. Actual fascist movements are broadly tolerant of all kinds of differences - competing crankeries of all kinds - within the general parameters of a project of ethno-nationalist unification and purification. Those who get the steel-capped end of the boot aren't those who "think differently" - fascism is full of self-described mavericks - but those whose existence and self-assertion is deemed to be inherently corrupt and degenerate from the perspective of that project. The disruption of fascist organisation by antifascists isn't motivated by an equivalent scheme of unity-purity/otherness-degeneracy, since antifascists aren't in the first instance concerned with restoring a lost vitality and purity to society imagined as an idealised pre-modern organic totality.

 

[stelfox]

I mean one basically trips over one's own laces the moment one associates fascism to "authoritarian suppression of difference" without further qualification. Actual fascist movements are broadly tolerant of all kinds of differences - competing crankeries of all kinds - within the general parameters of a project of ethno-nationalist unification and purification. Those who get the steel-capped end of the boot aren't those who "think differently" - fascism is full of self-described mavericks - but those whose existence and self-assertion is deemed to be inherently corrupt and degenerate from the perspective of that project. The disruption of fascist organisation by antifascists isn't motivated by an equivalent scheme of unity-purity/otherness-degeneracy, since antifascists aren't in the first instance concerned with restoring a lost vitality and purity to society imagined as an idealised pre-modern organic totality.

Hmmm, I view fascists as antithetical to unity, impure, other and degenerate, so by that rubric, I’m in a spot of bother.

 

[luka]

Any time I need to know anything about fascists I just ask Craner he usually knows.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, agreed on all that. In fact I think there's more diversity of thought on the far right than among the sort of people who congregate on tumblr and 'leftbook' tag groups on Facebook - although admittedly a lot of these people are pretty unhinged and obviously aren't representative of anything greater than themselves. For example there are fascist Protestants, fascist Catholics, fascists with a hard-on for Classical mythology, fascists trying to revive various kinds of European polytheism and fascist atheists.

I read an interesting article recently pointing out that while the extreme right (swastika-wavers per se) are generally consistent in being both antisemitic and anti-Zionist, much of the American hard right, including nearly all ultra-conservative Christians, are antisemitic and Zionist at the same time. Because for them, Jews are OK as long as they're where they're supposed to be, ie. in their own proper ethnostate, holding back the barbarian hordes, and not secretly running the media, financial systems and governments of Western countries. And of course Israel itself has strong fascist tendencies.

Edit: reply to poetix's last post.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Any time I need to know anything about fascists I just ask Craner he usually knows.

His recent piece about Jews in Italy was bloody great, wasn't it?

 

[poetix]

Fascists aren't as a rule particularly "pure", even by their own lights, but they hold certain kinds of purity as an ideal: racial purity, for example, or purity of will. Often there's a kind of splitting between the necessary impurity of one's deeds ("we stormtroopers have to do all of these horrible things") and the underlying purity of intent which animates them. It's why your Death In June fan will insist that every possible criticism of DIJ at the level of content or ideology is irrelevant, because they are pure artists and as such essentially above reproach.

I think some kinds of purity are desirable and worth seeking after. For example (one I was discussing with Luka the other day), the aesthetic approach which strips a work of art down to a kind of bare mathematical skeleton in order to examine its innermost mechanics, as Badiou does with Beckett, involves a kind of purification, boiling the meat off the bones. Purification in this sense is just one of a range of possible aesthetic or alchemical operations, things you can do with one kind of material in order to derive another. One of the things I think that old line about fascism as the "aestheticisation of politics" means is that fascism entails thinking you can treat society rather like a work of art, as having an ideal unity which is like the ideal unity of a work of art, so that you end up trying to make society better by cutting parts of it away.

Now you could say that cutting Nazis away from society would be a good thing, and make society better, and that the particular thing that's wrong with fascist ideology is that it's "divisive" and undermines social unity. But I think you have to torment meaning a bit to make that look like just the same thing. We don't want "unity" in the abstract, essentialist sense that fascism does; we want a basic sense of social solidarity that isn't undermined by racialised hierarchies. We don't want to excise a class of persons from the social body, we want to stop malignant political movements from forming and gaining power.

 

[stelfox]

Hmmm, I view fascists as antithetical to unity, impure, other and degenerate, so by that rubric, I’m in a spot of bother.

It’s also worth mentioning that I don’t think anyone being discussed here is a fascist, by any workable definition, apart from Pearce and, possibly Land. Fascism is a fairly specific ideology and not synonymous with “reactionary, controversialist bellend” . Not everyone with shit views is a Nazi and it is important to be specific, because it removes shrillness from the equation and makes opposition much more clear cut and far less disputable. That said, they’re all due roughly the same level of contempt.

 

[luka]

I'm becoming more and more uncomfortably aware of how personal and intimate this all is tbh. I'm happy to have dissensus used again but hopefully not to air dirty laundry rehearse old tiffs etc i feel a sense of unease actually, tbh

 

[luka]

To me your just video game characters I don't want to be involved in these ancient things please leave me out I don't care who did what to who when do you know what I mean?

 

[stelfox]

I'm becoming more and more uncomfortably aware of how personal and intimate this all is tbh. I'm happy to have dissensus used again but hopefully not to air dirty laundry rehearse old tiffs etc i feel a sense of unease actually, tbh

This kind of politics is pretty personal and much bigger than that at the same time. Not sure you can really avoid that.

 

[luka]

Yeah what I am saying is there are dynamics around that social circle that I think are fucking insane and give me the heebiejeebies because I can feel the turbulence of it I can feel the undertow. I don't know Dave, it gives me the willies. I don't know how involved you are with these people. We went our separate ways.

 

[luka]

Sorry not to say I don't like them as individuals which I do

 

[luka]

I really like talking to them because they are clever. I'm quite astonished sometimes by what they can do. But I'm a bit afraid of this emotional stuff I can feel underneath it churning. The undertow as I say.

 

[stelfox]

I’ve also found this the most productive and actually quite good-natured and, in the grand tradition of Dissensus, slightly weird and off-piste discussion of something that’s been bothering me for a little while.

 

[luka]

I think that we can host good discussions. Poetix who I have never met before turned up at my office yesterday and was saying Owen asked him what he was doing back here but I dunno.... I don't see what is wrong with the place people are lucky to have a clean communication channel