September 10, 2004
Lizards and Power
There is a descriptive phrase that often turns up here, malevolent impotence, that fits this 'obscene cissy' (eleutheria on John le Carré on Smiley on his boss) well.
Two terrifying stages of power: firstly, the horrifying elemental fierceness and cringing abjectness of the clambering up the ladder; but secondly, and more productive of le Carré's 'frustration beyond endurance', is the stage after power has been achieved. What's truly an object of horror is this smirking, degenerate slothfulness - perhaps one does better to invoke David Icke's lizards (surely gaining more credence by the moment with Blair Bush and Rumsfeld in the picture): eery statues of cold flesh whose rare, only-when-absolutely-necessary attacks happen devastatingly, in the blinking of an eye, and disappear, as if they never happened - where the only object, the only motive left, is to maintain position, so the less movement, the better. Lie, cheat, let everything go to destruction, but don't let the mask crack.
Like fifty-foot statues, one sees in them, as constitutive of them, their eventual and inevitable fall, the weary crumble and lurch that will come sooner or later. And yet 'uncontrollable fury' wells up in the interim, when they become the singular, enduring personification of the enjoyment of power. Then you see, despite the innovative pushing-the-envelope jargon of the managerial and entrepreneurial hegemony, despite people's convoluted ideals and ideas, what power is really for, what it has always been for : to stop things happening.
But inside this inanimate shell of power, like a decaying russian doll, there remains a will, catatonic, furious, screaming, disappointed, and it's in the quieting of this will that you find the malevolent impotence, the defeated will to overcome power, to escape from the final achievement, back to the climb and the drive that accidentally brought you to the peak. Power contains distilled, pure violence; it's the capture and measured dissemination of force. An internal combustion engine, choked forward by contained explosions. So you're always in power. We're all CEOs; every human being is surrounded by these shells, and the longer you're trapped the more malevolent impotence takes hold in the form of ressentiment.
It was Bacon's metier to paint the trapped forces, to unleash them in the form of paint, rather than to depict their containment : To show that 'we' are (at least, are also) the scream not the horror, the real not its frozen-subjected image, the puissance (force) not the pouvoir (power).
Posted by robin at September 10, 2004 03:27 PM
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