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capitalist pig

Capitalist Pig 5: White Cocksuckas

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A long overdue Patreon bonus essay for you. Last War in Albion will be back next week with a chapter of nonstop formalist gubbins. The Abominable Bride review will be up late tonight. Happy New Year’s, and may 2016 bring the end of western civilization. Tomorrow brings the end of the annual sale on my back catalogue. 

“Burn the land, boil the sea.” – Theme from Firefly

In Warren Ellis’s 2013 novella Dead Pig Collector the protagonist, Mister Sun, describes his job in terms of the title phrase, explaining that in China (“a place rife with pollution and disease”) pig farmers often face large-scale deaths of pigs due to the aforementioned pollution and disease, which presents a major challenge. “A small farm – and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms – cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.” And since the penalties for selling such pigs into the market are steep, “there are people who have learned to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.” As Mister Sun explains all of this, he is pouring bleach through a pair of holes cut into a plastic sheet laid over a bathtub in order to break down the blood within. Mr. Sun, see, is a hit man specializing in the efficient and untraceable disposal of the resulting corpse. 

Many things are in the mix here – most basically this story from Foreign Policy, although Ellis changes the economic situation around in his story, eliding the fact that the government-hired dead pig collectors are in practice not getting work because the illegal pig traders offer a better economic deal – but one, almost certainly, is Deadwood, a television show that Ellis has raved about on many grounds, but most notably (and appropriately) for the way in which you want to call everybody a cocksucker for hours after watching an episode.

See, Deadwood has a minor but fan-favorite character in the form of Mr. Wu, the de facto leader of the Chinese population in Deadwood, who, among the many social roles he performs within the camp, keeps a bunch of pigs that are routinely used to dispose of the many bodies that pile up in the camp. Wu is an odd and somewhat troubling character. He’s a clear fan favorite, but for uncomfortable reasons mostly related to the stereotypical pidgin in which he speaks and the boundless enthusiasm of Keone Young as he shouts “COCKSUCKA” or his endearing mispronunciation of Al Swearengen’s name as “Swedgin.” And, of course, there’s something fundamentally depressing about the way in which the narrative reinforces its characters’ marginalization of the Chinese population by giving them, basically, a single speaking representative who, due to not speaking the same language as any of the other characters, rarely actually gets a plotline.

But for all of this, Wu’s presence in Deadwood is a potent image, and not just for the fact that it’s relatively novel to actually acknowledge the role Chinese immigrants played in American expansionism.…

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Lost Exegesis (Walkabout)

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So I guess we were right, back in the Tabula Rasa entry, about Locke’s first name being John, an invocation of the historical John Locke. We must be, like, psychic or something.

A brief history, then. John Locke was a very privileged white man, born in 1632, England. He went to Oxford, studied with such famous scientists as Newton and Boyle, and determined to become a doctor. By 1666, Locke had teamed up with Dr. David Thomas to run a laboratory, probably a pharmacy. Through Thomas, Locke met Lord Anthony Cooper (one of the richest men in England and later the Earl of Shaftesbury) and became his personal physician. Lord Ashley also helped secure a government job for Locke, and for the next ten years or so Locke lived at Lord Ashley’s estate. Locke eventually went back to Oxford and received a Bachelor of Medicine and a license to practice.

But Locke isn’t primarily known as a physician so much as a philosopher, indeed a founder of liberalism. Mind you, we’re talking about the 17th Century. Locke isn’t a “leftist” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, his philosophy forms part of the bedrock of capitalism, from his early theories on prices, money, unlimited accumulation, and a theory of government oriented around the protection of private property versus one that is motivated by, say, compassion. Much of this philosophy is rooted in his conception of our “state of nature”:

“To understand political power right, and derive it from the original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise

So it’s amazingly prescient, given the state of pigfuckery today that LOST’s Locke ends up bringing home a boar. But on the Island, John Locke is not presented as a literal embodiment of the historical figure, despite his constant admonishment, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” On the contrast, he’s a frustrated man who has experienced a kind of rebirth, a literal “ascension” given the miraculous restoration of his legs.

Hence the Opening Eye motif at the beginning of the episode.

As mentioned in the exegesis of Pilot Part 1, the Opening Eye is fraught with symbolism. An awakening, becoming aware of an inner truth, a spiritual revelation. Even a resurrection. But Locke’s eye isn’t meant to be “read” in the same way as Jack’s. Locke’s right eye (or, rather, “eye”) is bifurcated by a scar running vertically down “across” is center. His insight, then is “crossed” with Jack’s.

In one sense, we could say Locke’s resurrection is exteriorized as opposed to interiorized. His body has been reborn. He can walk. But is just as angry and self-oriented as before the crash, as evidenced by his casual dismissal of Michael’s injury in favor of his own self-aggrandizement in pursuing the boar.…

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Capitalist Pig 4: Black Mirror, Grey Miasma of Bland Cultural Commentary

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There is a moment in the first episode of Black Mirror, in which, in the midst of conjuring the future that is now our pigfucking reality, a character mentions that the Guardian has posted a brief column about the cultural significance of the pig. The script does not specify whether it is by Jonathan Jones, but it’s safe to assume that it is. Call it a headcanon, as the kids say on social media.

It’s a soft jab, to be sure, not least because Brooker is himself a Guardian columnist, offering such gripping insights as an unfunny ripoff of Jack’s “Tricky Dicky” series and this shitty thing about a German project to build an adaptive AI to play Super Mario World in which Brooker blatanty brainstorms for the forthcoming-to-Netflix twelve-episode third season of Black Mirror while demonstrating a complete lack of interest in any sort of material understanding of the technology he’s decided to undertake as his journalistic beat. Or perhaps more accurately a loving jab; after all, part of the heady genius of “The National Anthem” is the sublime coherence of its premise. In short, it works because the choice of fucking a pig is tremendously clever.

Well, no, that’s too simple. It works because it constrains itself to the world it’s set in. It’s still built largely out of satirical absurdism, but it keeps its excesses carefully chosen and strangely modest, and then follows them to a logical end. Put another way, it’s about a man who fucks a pig, but it takes its pigfucking seriously, not just following the premise to its inevitable and squealing conclusion but appreciably far past it as mass spectacle turns to mass horror and finally the same banal political reality that presumably preceded it.

The problem, to be blunt, comes when Black Mirror embraces technology, which it does with tedious half-heartedness. The second season episode “Be Right Back” is illustrative. In one sense it shares all the glimmering high points of “The National Anthem.” Its casting is impeccable – Haley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson are as good a leading pair as any show has ever had. It’s gleefully high concept, revelling in rural gothic iconography and cod-Frankenstein moments. It’s emotional and clever and well-done. And literally the only thing it has to say about the world is “social media’s kind of artificial, isn’t it?”

There are two problems here. The first is that Black Mirror, and indeed Brooker’s work in general, is irksomely non-materialist in its approach to technology. The aforementioned Mario AI column is instructive. Here’s the actual paper that inspired the article. What quickly becomes apparent here is the extent to which all of the enthused talk about how the AI “experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape,” in fact all that’s happened is that the researchers have come up with clickbait-friendly ways to describe the process of solving Mario.…

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Capitalist Pig 3: The Synthetic Rat

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I was there at the birth,
Out of the cloudburst,

The head of the tempest.

Murderer!

Murder of calm.

– Kate Bush, ‘Little Earth’

 

Let’s, for now, posit a classical Hegelian dialectical triad. And let’s take the pig as the first point of our triad: the thesis. And let’s – as per Phil’s suggestion – take cancer as another point of the same triad: the antithesis. What would be the synthesis?

 

It’s worth making a short digression actually, on the issue of whether or not cancer and pigs are antithetical. In one sense, obviously not. Pigs get cancer. Pigs are used in cancer research. Eating bacon – even a tiny bit, once – will definitely give you cancer, as research has recently proved.

 

David Cameron is a cancer eating away at the heart of our society, and he once had intimate relations with a pig… and yet it’s hard to say that those relations, for all their intimacy, were not antithetical. After all, the pig in question was dead, and had presumably been killed and decapitated so that it could be brought to table for the members (ahem) of the Piers Gaveston society. There can hardly be any more antithetical relationship between any two subjects than that between diner and dish… and yet they are also inextricably unified. Diner and dish, and thence stomach and contents, cells and nutrition, and – ultimately – rectum and faeces. Did Cameron and his fellow Gavestonians consume the pigs they debauched? Pigs, moreover, that had previously satiated their other appetites – be they sexual, socio-cultural, or some combination thereof? If so, they entered into a relationship far more complex than the antithetical one between subject and object. And yet the antithesis remains. In the dancing fluctuation of the dialectic, the opposites are unified and the negation is negated. Just as pigs can suffer cancer – thus unifying themselves with cancer – they are also negated by cancer (as ultimately are we all) and negate cancer in return by dying and thus killing the very cancer cells which have killed them. In the end, cancer is self-negating – as, it is to be hoped, David Cameron will be – and the pig is as good a vehicle – or delivery system, or host – for this self-negation, as any creature.

 

We have established two important principles:

 

1. That cancer and the pig are antithetical, and

 

2. That cancer and the pig exist in an inseparable unity of opposites.

 

We arrive at the point of the synthesis without even trying. The synthesis is that most Marxist of insights: the fundamental, dialectical interconnectedness, and mutual reproduction, of the exploiter and the exploited. But how can this synthesis take form? So far we seem to have been heading to the obvious point of, say, selecting faeces as the synthesis. The faeces of the pig-eater… and yet, if we are to continue to subvert our original classically Hegelian dialectic (an essentially idealist formulation) into a historical materialist dialectic, we must take note of the fact that David Cameron’s crap doesn’t lead us anywhere.…

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Capitalist Pig 2: This Time It’s About Cancer

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Slabs of bacon fresh from the smoker and resting in the author’s kitchen.

Hey pig. Yeah you. Hey pig piggy pig pig pig. All of my fears came true. – Nine Inch Nails, “Piggy”

Amidst the defiant application of early Kubler-Ross stages to the recent news that bacon causes cancer was this collection of Islamophobic Twitter ravings, which, like any conspiracy theory, is right about everything except for any of the details whatsoever. The truth is more fundamental; the entire biomechanical edifice upon which bacon rests has once again been uncomfortably revealed to be wallowing in its own shit.

Religious prohibitions serve multiple overlapping ideological purposes. Among them: religious leaders are public health officials, a fact visible in the way in which local religious leaders and traditional healers have been successfully used in the apparently successful fight to eradicate polio in Nigeria, the last country in Africa to suffer from it – and note how Nigeria is part of the supposedly “uncivilized and barbaric” world of Boko Haram, the Taliban and ISIS. Even at the furthest edges of social collapse religion provides a public health service. (Consider also the way in which the American hospital system is to a significant degree church-owned, although this fact is more likely to deprive women of endometriosis treatment than to pay for their breast cancer treatment.)

And the Islamic prohibition against pork is a prime example of this function of religion. It’s rooted in the historical conditions of the Near East; similar prohibitions exist in Jewish law. Pigs, as literal urban shit-eaters, were unhealthy, parasite-ridden nightmares. Convincing poor people to not eat them in spite of their obvious cost efficiency was an important goal. Indeed, the cultural prohibition against pork extends far beyond the Middle East and into India, a fact that doesn’t fit Islamophobic biases and so is conveniently forgotten.

Obviously this is not a problem that still meaningfully exists. Or, at least, it’s one that can easily be overcome in a globalized economy. Its persistence is thus a mark of conscious difference. In modern Islam, the prohibition on pork is like the Hindu prohibition on cow or the American Catholic obligation to go to McDonalds on Fridays in Lent – an act of cultural solidarity. As, to be fair, is the Western tradition of pigfucking, derived as it is from Roman pig sacrifices and the basic fact that the forested terrain of Europe made for a food unmatched in succulence and efficiency.

Which is why the news that bacon causes cancer is so existentially unsettling to the West. Bacon is culinary technology; its efficiency, especially in its gruesomely industrialized modern incarnation, is profit, and, for that matter, military superiority, hence the Disney-made propaganda cartoon that reminded World War II housewives that “a skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory.” Bacon is capitalism made flesh.

And now that flesh betrays us. Moreover, it’s a specific property of bacon that does the deed. In order to preserve the meat longer, some of the salt used for bacon is what’s known as pink salt or curing salt.…

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