Carnivorous Machines

Golem Update

From today's New York Times

Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

Milan Jaros for The New York Times

In signs of the current vogue for the Golem, a souvenir shop in Prague sells statuettes.

Published: May 10, 2009

By Dan Bilefsky

PRAGUE — They say the Golem, a Jewish giant with glowing eyes and supernatural powers, is lurking once again in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue here.

Milan Jaros for The New York Times

Small stones left by visitors at the tombstone of its supposed maker, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.

The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis. True to form, he is once again experiencing a revival and, in this commercial age, has spawned a one-monster industry.

There are Golem hotels; Golem door-making companies; Golem clay figurines (made in China); a recent musical starring a dancing Golem; and a Czech strongman called the Golem who bends iron bars with his teeth. The Golem has also infiltrated Czech cuisine: the menu at the non-kosher restaurant called the Golem features a “rabbi’s pocket of beef tenderloin” and a $7 “crisis special” of roast pork and potatoes that would surely have rattled the venerable Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Golem’s supposed maker.

Even the first lady, Michelle Obama, paid her respects, when she visited Rabbi Loew’s grave last month and, following Jewish tradition, placed a prayer on a piece of paper and put it near his tombstone.

Eva Bergerova, a theater director who is staging a play about the Golem, said it was no coincidence that this Central European story was ubiquitous at a time of swine flu and economic distress. “The Golem starts wandering the streets during times of crises, when people are worried,” Ms. Bergerova said. “He is a projection of society’s neuroses, a symbol of our fears and concerns. He is the ultimate crisis monster.”

Rabbi Manis Barash, who oversees an institute here devoted to Rabbi Loew’s work, said that “because of the financial crisis, people were increasingly turning to spirituality for meaning.”

Others, like Jakub Roth, a derivatives trader and a leader of the Jewish community, noted that the Golem had contemporary relevance because he protected sacred values from imminent dangers. “In the past this was anti-Semitism,” Mr. Roth said. “Today it is global recession, Islamic fundamentalism and Russian aggression.”

The surge in popularity of the Golem also anticipates the 400th anniversary in September of Rabbi Loew’s death in 1609, at nearly 100. A Jewish mystic and philosopher who a leading scholar of the Talmud and kabbalah and wrote at least 22 books, he was known widely as the Maharal, a great sage.

Few here dispute that the Golem, who is often depicted as either a menacing brown blob or an artificial humanoid, has become a lucrative global brand. But it is also a profound irritation to Prague’s Jewish leaders that Rabbi Loew’s legacy has been hijacked by a powerful dunce whom the Talmud characterizes as a “fool.”

“I am frustrated by the legend of the Golem in the same way I am frustrated that people buy Kafka souvenirs on every street in Prague but don’t bother to read his books,” Rabbi Karel Sidon, the chief rabbi of the Czech Republic, lamented. Alluding to the recent rise of neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, however, he hastened to add, “We like the Golem because he protected the Jews.”

Rabbi Barash emphasized that in the Talmud, the Golem was considered a dumb klutz because he was literal-minded, could not speak and had no “sechel,” or intellect. “If in school,” he said, “you didn’t use your brains, the teacher would say, ‘Stop behaving like a golem.’ ”

According to one version of Prague’s Golem legend, the city’s Jews, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, were being attacked, falsely accused of using the blood of Christians to perform their rituals. To protect the community, Rabbi Loew built the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River.

He used his knowledge of kabbalah to make it come alive, inscribing the Hebrew word emet, or truth, on the creature’s forehead. The Golem, whom he called Josef and who was known as Yossele, patrolled the ghetto; it is said he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead.

Eventually, the Golem is said to have gone on a murderous rampage — out of unrequited love, some explain. Fearing that he could fall into the wrong hands, Rabbi Loew smeared clay on the Golem’s forehead, turning emet into met, the Hebrew word for death, and put him to rest in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.

Though a quintessentially Jewish tale, the saga of the Golem, popularized here in a 1950s fairy tale film, has long been regarded as a Czech legend. Benjamin Kuras, a Czech playwright and the author of the book “As Golems Go,” said the fighting figure of the Golem had appeal in a nation traumatized by centuries of occupation and invasion.

“After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression,” Mr. Kuras said. “Many here don’t even realize he is a Jewish monster.”

Such is the pull of the Golem that Rabbi Sidon said he received dozens of requests each year for visits to the Golem’s attic lair — requests he politely declined. During World War II, it was rumored that Nazi soldiers broke into the synagogue, and Rabbi Loew’s Golem ripped them apart, limb by limb.

“We say the Golem is in the attic, up there,” Rabbi Sidon said. “But I have never gone there. I say that if the Golem was put there 400 years ago, then today he is dirt and dust and can’t do anything to disturb anyone.”

Asked if the Golem was fact or fiction, Rabbi Sidon shrugged and sighed. “It’s possible he is real,” the rabbi said. “I just don’t know.” But he noted that there had been several cases of sage rabbis who had supposedly created golems.

Rabbi Sidon recalled that in the late 1990s, an elderly Jewish woman asked him where the Golem was. “I told her he was in the attic,” Rabbi Sidon said. “ ‘Not that one, the real one,’ ” he said the woman replied, insisting that she had been at the synagogue a year earlier and had met Mr. Golem, a lanky figure with ruddy cheeks.

Recognizing the description, the rabbi said, he confronted the synagogue’s shamash, or attendant, a man called Josef, who shares the Golem’s first name. Josef eventually confessed that he had been telling visitors he was the Golem’s great-grandson.

Excerpts from THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE - by Guy Debord

The Society of the Spectacle, like most post-modern Continental philosophy, is notoriously and intentionally difficult to summarize. On the one hand, it explicitly attempts, like The Communist Manifesto, to bring the lessons of abstruse philosophy to the masses in order to bring about actual revolution; on the other, it abounds in satirical references and in-jokes that render the text nearly incomprehensible to anyone but an academic intellectual versed in Hegel, Freud, the history of Marxism, and the Dada art movement.

The predominant theme that makes the work relevant for this course, however, is the characterization of the circulation of images through mass media as an historical development that fundamentally changes humans and society--as Marx says they were changed by industrial production and the rise of capitalism. On this theory, capitalism "alienated" the workers' labor, wrecking the real meaning of life and dividing society into two opposed classes.
But (like many others) Debord holds that capitalism further developed into a system ultimately more concerned with consumption than production: To maintain production, and thus the whole economic system, consumption requires constant stimulation and larger markets, created by mass media's stimulation of desire and by constantly expanding global markets (through a kind of cultural colonialism, spreading the capitalist world's desire for goods around the world).
In Marx's time, the evidence of the evils of capitalism was in the privation and misery of the lives of the proletariat; in Debord's (and our own) it is the "false consciousness" of the entirely imaginary, entirely inauthentic life imposed by the culture of consumption--another, even more complete form of alienation than the alienation of labor. Debord--and like-minded thinkers referred to as "Situationists" or "the Situationist International"--urge a revolutionary position against "the Society of the Spectacle" that fosters this illusion, but do not appear to propose specific changes in the system of production and consumption. Instead, they offer criticism of contemporary society very largely through artworks of one kind or another: Situationism began with artists in the 1950s in France, and stands in the background of many developments in art since then, including varieties of British and Continental punk music and fashion, conceptual and political art in the US, and the incorporation of mass art styles and references into the accredited art of galleries and museums. The Society of the Spectacle has influenced bands, visual artists, video games, YouTube videos, and perhaps most famously the film The Matrix, which derived its central idea of enslavement to an illusory alternate reality from Debord.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord imitated some of the philosophers he most admired (including Marx in the Communist Manifesto) by writing a series of provocative assertions rather than a connected argument, and by assuming a kind of universal moral stance rather than producing historical or other empirical evidence. This method is probably responsible for the impact the text has had, as well as the skepticism with which it has been treated; it is what makes the work seem so thoroughly a product of the French intellectual scene, which makes it so attractive to some and merely pretentious to others.
Conveniently, each section is short enough to treat as a kernel for contemplation of the production and consumption of images in contemporary life. Here is a selection from the early parts of the book:

1
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Q: What does “directly lived” mean?
Where does this idea come from that people used to live in a reality that no longer is experienced?

2
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. . . .

Q: There is a separate life apart from the actual life we live?

4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

Q: Does that mean that we don’t recognize how the whole system of images is affecting us because we treat is as just a bunch of images?

5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

Q: Does that mean it’s not entertainment but ideology? That the totality of images created by mass media are a kind of contemporary holy scripture?


6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. . . .

Q: Does this mean that advertising is more than just advertising?--that it actually sustains the whole system of production as well as consumption? (That is, it maintains in the workforce both the need, the ability, and the willingness to work under existing conditions.)


12
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” . . .


15
As indispensable embellishment of currently produced objects, as general articulation of the system’s rationales, and as advanced economic sector that directly creates an ever-increasing mass of image-objects, the spectacle is the leading production of present-day society.

Q: To the extent that the spectacle creates and sustains the need for consumption, everything else feeds into, is part of, and is subordinate to the spectacle?
Therefore new forms of entertainment, new styles, attempts at subversion, can all be co-opted because they feed into the spectacle?


 
20
. . . The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond” . . .

27
. . . what is referred to as a “liberation from work,” namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced.

Q: What is “leisure”? Is it different from “free time”? If all activities outside of work support the same system as work does, is there any real “free time"?


28
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” . . .

Q: Do new technologies and consumer products (cars, TV, cellphones, laptops, iPods) tend to encourage isolation? Is the tendency of new technologies to divide and conquer, while maintaining the appearance that everyone is “linked in”? Is the “freedom to consume” keeping people from a better life of more social connection and less use of resources by overemphasizing individual control in order to stimulate consumption?

34
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.


Q: Are images the real “money” of our time?


40
. . . Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. . . .

Q: As the general standard of living has risen, has it resulted in greater self-determination or autonomy?

44
The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. . . .

Q: Are we addicted to a system of consumption that depends on constantly keeping us in a state of (imagined) privation?


45
Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

Q: If automation revolutionized industrial production, providing the impetus for a new service economy, what happens when automation spreads to service industries? At what point do human workers become obsolete?


47
. . . The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion, and the spectacle is its general expression.

Situationist International - Part 1 of 3

Situationist International - Part 2 of 3

Situationist International - Part 3 of 3

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? excerpt 1

Debord was interested in "detournement"--the appropriation of existing cultural documents, using them in collage or montage forms ironically to enrich irony. The practice seems to derive partly from Duchamp's alteration of the Mona Lisa.