All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 26, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
34:53
Delingpod 38: D C Miller
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Paul.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
Unless another time subscribe with me.
I love Danny Paul.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
If I'm sounding slightly discombobulated, it's just because I've recorded a really, really interesting 15-minute conversation with today's podcast guest and I forgot to press the record button, which is really annoying because actually it was gold and now we're going to have to go through it all over again and my special guest, Dan, Daniel Miller, It's going to have to go through it all again.
Daniel, I'm really sorry.
That's okay.
So I first came upon Daniel two years ago when I was trawling through my Twitter pages and I saw a link to this footage on YouTube of this guy standing outside an art gallery.
Somewhere in London.
Holding up a sign and being given absolute hell and misery by a bunch, by a mob of leftist protesters and they were kind of virtually spitting in his face.
It was really unpleasant and he was standing there calmly.
Daniel, tell me what your sign said, first of all.
The right to openly discuss ideas must be defended.
And then the other side said, stand up to violence and intimidation.
Those are quite controversial messages.
I can see now why they were attacking you, because freedom of speech, an artistic expression, really has no place in these enlightened times, does it?
Well, apparently it is under threat.
Yeah.
So tell me about, because I didn't know who you were at the time, and there wasn't much written about it, I don't think.
It was just kind of this video.
Sometimes you're not sure when you see these videos what the context is.
Anyway, you can tell me now what was happening.
Well, I was standing outside an art gallery called LD50, which is an independent art gallery in East London, run by a Spanish woman named Lucia Diego.
And what happened was, in the run-up to Trump's election, which as you recall was quite a mysterious event for many commentators, Who were really flabbergasted that Trump enjoyed the kind of popularity that he did.
Programmed an exhibition about memes on the internet and also organized a conference in which he invited a number of speakers from the right to reflect on the meaning of Trumpism and also related matters.
By the right, who do you mean?
Because I wasn't invited.
She probably didn't know who I was, but she should have invited me.
But who did they get?
Well, it was specifically about something called neoreaction, which is a kind of internet-based philosophy.
It was started by somebody named Curtis Yarvin, who's a computer programmer based in the west coast of America.
It's quite interesting.
It has different kinds of meanings and interpretations associated with it.
The other main figure associated with it is a guy called Nick Land, who is a controversial and interesting philosopher.
He used to work at Warwick University.
Why is he controversial?
He's controversial, well, for several reasons.
One is that he was an extremely colourful and charismatic figure at Warwick University where he started something called the C-Crew, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which was a kind of early 90s effort to understand what the internet was all about.
He then...
Sort of flamed out of academia in a blitz of psychedelia, went to China, and now is based in China, where he has a Twitter feed which is suddenly off the reservation of the prevailing liberal consensus in academia.
Blimey.
Okay.
So, yeah, quite...
There's this whole world that you're a part of that I don't know anything about, really.
And...
My brother was at art college, and I think he may have been at art college with the guy who founded Freeze.
So I had a sort of taste of that, but I quickly thought, art students, it's another world.
And so there was this exhibition of memes, which, by the way, I think is a really good idea.
I agree.
I mean, it was really exciting, wasn't it, in the run-up to the Trump election.
All these Pepe the Frog memes...
Was that the kind of thing that was on in this gallery?
Pepe the Frog memes or...?
Yeah, I think broadly speaking, it was specifically the material produced by a group of Twitter users, so-called Frog Twitter.
It somehow is almost disbanded now.
Frog Twitter?
Yeah, they're kind of neo-data, I would say.
Right.
Is that why I didn't understand all the memes I saw?
Because they were so obscure that you had to have understood the previous memes they were based on?
Yeah.
Well, I think that with a lot of things on the internet, not only there, of course, but I mean, with art in general, of course, it's not so easy necessarily to understand immediately what it is or what it means.
And, you know, this is why it is art, in a sense, as opposed to simply a sign.
Yeah.
But in any case, what happened was, as a result of...
LD50 programming this material.
Subsequent to Trump's election, there was a private message that she exchanged with an artist called Sophie Jung, an art student in London, in which Lucia expressed reservations about the decision of the New York MoMA to protest Trump's travel ban.
This message was leaked and it triggered this kind of escalating spiral of condemnations in which from statements that were too supportive of Trump for the radical left London art world to tolerate, it rapidly became that actually LD50 wasn't an art gallery at all.
It was a secret fascist cell or neo-Nazi recruitment center.
And I saw no evidence whatsoever to support this inflammatory and preposterous charge.
So they organized a demonstration.
They wanted to close down this gallery.
They said that it was a matter of urgency, of public safety, that this gallery be closed down immediately.
This is a group of independent...
Art students who are claiming the right, basically, to exercise a veto on the programming decisions of art galleries in London.
And they did organize a demonstration.
It was supported by all of the mainstream and apparently responsible institutions of the contemporary art world and also beyond the art world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Mayor of Hackney, and other institutions as well.
And what about the magazines?
You say that...
Also, the Art World magazine's Art Monthly, which is funded by the Arts Council.
Freeze Magazine, which is in a way the sort of house magazine of the neoliberal art world.
Everybody supported this campaign, apart from me, and I went with my sign because I was outraged, actually, that this act of complete injustice and, in a sense, madness was being not only tolerated, but in a certain way encouraged.
You seem a very mild-mannered, thoughtful fellow.
Was this your first essay at Political Activism?
Well, I wouldn't say that I'm a political activist.
I've been around in different places.
I also worked in Ramallah for a while and I also worked in Haiti.
Blimey!
We'll come to that.
I'm not averse to somewhat risky situations.
I mean initially, in fact, Lucia and I had a plan to do something more entertainingly surrealistic than simply me with my sign but she backed out on police advice and I still thought that a statement should be made and so that's what I did.
So what was your surrealist plan?
Well, we were going to dress up in costumes and turn it into more of a spectacle, in a way.
Right.
And were you scared?
Because they were nasty, I remember.
People can look it up, presumably.
Is it still on YouTube?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the full video has somehow disappeared, but there is video footage available.
And how long did you stand there for?
About 15 minutes.
Okay.
And they were right up in your face, weren't they?
Yeah, it was an interesting experience because it was an experience of people who somehow were seeing a reality that really wasn't there, you know, and it was a sense of a complete ideological possession because I had my sign, which is quite a normal sign, and they couldn't see this sign as anything other than a kind of trigger to this, you know, fantasy that they were somehow really easily led by and eager to believe in.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I would say also a connected point is that in a way this has been continuing now for two years because subsequent to...
Staging this protest, I was completely blacklisted by a lot of the art world.
Even my name somehow can't be mentioned there.
The reason is because I didn't go along with the art world's line on these matters.
The reason why the art world has a line is another question altogether, which is also quite interesting.
Tell me.
Well, it's to do with what the art world has really become, what contemporary art has become for the last several decades, and the kinds of conditions which reign there in terms of the way the art world replicates itself politically and then the ideology that it sort of uses to do so.
Now, we were talking just a moment ago, there's...
A course, for example, which I think is very representative of what the contemporary art world is all about, you can go and study in CalArts.
It costs $40,000 a year, and you learn about Marxist aesthetics and left-wing politics.
I remember when I was an art critic, I became at a certain point very interested in the fact that the art world is somehow unceasingly committed to replicating a certain form of left-wing rhetoric but at the same time is operating on the basis of extremely hierarchical and vertical structures and so the relationship between these two things became very interesting to me and I think that the kind of cognitive dissonance which is produced by a system that on the one hand
is constantly instructing its graduates in concepts of criticism of social justice activism And of a certain kind of idealism or utopianism.
On the other hand, in the very act of instructing them in these forms of criticism, is actually exploiting them, creates an extremely volatile psychological environment, which almost then compels people to sort of act out in this way.
And what's happened in the art world in the last several years following Trump's election, but of course this was also happening before, is this sort of hysteria about the idea of fascism everywhere.
We see it also in other kinds of cultural sectors that are organized under similar premises.
But it's a way in which the art world is sort of somehow trying to protect itself and also legitimate itself by casting as its enemy this very terrifying image of these very terrifying people, you know, and this kind of après nous, le déluge sort of situation and this kind of après nous, le déluge sort of situation whereby, in
There's a perpetual hunt for a kind of scapegoat by means of which the art world, this kind of shaky elite, can use to maintain control over this system which I think is actually rapidly spiralling out of control.
Presumably...
There are people in the art world who can make an absolute fortune.
I mean, post-Damien Hirst, there are people who are still commanding those kind of fees.
But presumably to become one of those people, you have to fit into the accepted orthodoxy, otherwise you're anathematised.
Well, there are somehow different streams of the art world.
I mean, to the extent that it's also a little bit misleading even to speak about a single entity because the kind of level that somebody like Damien Hirst is playing on, you know, he's working with extremely wealthy individuals who are looking to basically store their wealth into these sort of art objects.
The art industry is obviously an unregulated industry.
The way money moves around at this level...
It has a lot more in common with the financial services industry than it does with anything to do with art.
But the sort of more normal level, and the level at which most art comes to the public, is through state-funded institutions, also through universities.
And this part of the art world is really devoted to ideology.
And it's a form of ideology actually which isn't necessarily devoted to making you think anything in particular, but is almost more concerned with somehow preventing you from being able to think at all.
And that's what we're sort of somehow dealing with actually.
And that's what you're dealing with in the major public galleries.
You have a certain kind of atmosphere, I think, which one feels whenever one wanders into them, this kind of suffocating atmosphere, this kind of atmosphere of a certain kind of thing being claimed of you, certain kind of images being put forward for you, a certain kind of piety, a kind of sterile piety.
That actually is directing art towards the audience in an extremely specific manner, which is not designed to help them to think about anything but quite the reverse.
And one of the things that I found very interesting about LD50 was this willingness to engage with material from the other side, as it were.
Because I think that art can be a space and should be a space in which...
Serious thinking is done and serious encounters are made with the outside, with whatever outside it is.
And that was a threat, obviously, a major threat to an art system which is organized on a completely different basis.
Surely one of the points of art is that it ought to be able to discuss everything, and especially things that you're not supposed to discuss.
I mean, isn't that a bit like comedy?
Doesn't it serve that function?
So art is failing at the moment.
Very much so.
Well, does that mean...
Because obviously art is about revolutions and counter-revolutions, isn't it?
Does that mean that somewhere bubbling under in various, I don't know, private colleges or various private galleries, there is a kind of counter-revolution on its way?
Or are we stuck with this Marxist tyranny?
Well, I think that what we have...
Today is a kind of new academicism.
It's a sort of conceptual academicism.
It's based on a certain kind of theoretical or conceptual set of premises but it's not different in kind from the academicism that existed in the 19th century.
It's about institutional control of aesthetic production and it's about in effect licensing certain kinds of artists as the artists and licensing a certain kind of art as the art and it's very jealously protecting The whole domain of art from outsiders and in fact even mobilizing groups to shut down independent people who are interested in doing something different.
But I don't think it is going to be able to sustain that for too much longer and I think there's a lot of appetite for something more vital.
And more invigorating and more interesting and more avant-garde.
And like I said, I'm a surrealist.
And so I do believe in a kind of form of art as a certain form of life which actually is quite anti-institutional in its orientation.
And I think that is coming.
I think what we have...
Now, there's a lot of people who are very afraid for different reasons of saying anything.
I mean, they've seen the consequences of what happens if you do stick your neck out.
I think the reality as well is that most people are necessarily so courageous in their attitudes, and of course it's fatal for an artist not to be courageous, but I think the truth is that most people who are somehow defined as artists today are not very courageous at all.
It means that they're producing a very kind of conformist and a very sort of asinine art.
But I think that the desire for something more imaginative is still there and I think it's growing actually and I don't think we're going to be suffering with this for too much longer.
Tell me briefly about your other life when you were adventuring in places like Ramallah and, what did you say, Haiti?
What were you doing?
I mean, I worked myself in the art world for a number of years.
I worked with an Israeli performance group called Public Movement, which was somehow a quite surrealistic enterprise in itself, and we did different projects together.
I taught art in Ramallah.
Which is a very interesting experience.
I would go back and forth across the checkpoints every week.
Yeah.
You're Jewish yourself?
Yes.
English or Israeli?
I'm American, actually.
You're American?
Okay.
And did you feel safe when you taught in Ramallah?
Well, I mean, more or less, but I wouldn't say also that my priority is feeling safe at all times, actually.
I think that it's more interesting to be in situations in which one is taking risks.
Were they receptive to your teaching?
Yeah, I made some good friends there.
It was an interesting experience as well for me.
I think I maybe learned more from it than they learned from me.
What sort of things were you teaching them?
Well, I mean, that was an interesting question for me because also there was an art school that was set up, actually funded by the Norwegian government, to train artists.
And the role of art coming from that area is a whole other question.
But, you know, there's a certain kind of interest on behalf of European institutions to present Palestinian art of a certain kind.
What do you mean, like what sort of propaganda art?
Well, I mean, I think that, you know, I have a very good friend who's a Palestinian artist and he, I think, suffers from this sort of double bind in an interesting way because on the one hand...
Palestine, like many other parts of the world, somehow enters into the Western imaginary as primarily a political space.
And so artists who are coming from that space then are given a certain amount of oxygen in order to kind of represent their, for example, Palestinian-ness.
Now, from the point of view of an artist who sort of wants to be a kind of universalist artist in the sort of mode of Picasso...
It's a difficult situation because on the one hand you're being given opportunities precisely on the basis of your particularity but on the other hand you're wanting opportunities on the basis of your universalist artistic genius and so how this is kind of navigated is sort of interesting but I mean you know when I was there I was somehow a little bit confused because I felt a little bit like a sort of missionary coming from the west sort of armed with this kind of you know like Certain kind of,
like, theoretical information.
I wasn't sure, like, is it the case that somehow my role should be to sort of, I don't know, teach the Palestinians this kind of stuff?
Or, I mean, what kind of encounter could I have there?
So, I mean, that was interesting for me to do.
And then in Haiti I did a project where it was based on André Breton's visit to Haiti.
He went there in 1945, actually, shortly after the Second World War, to deliver a series of lectures on Surrealism.
And, in fact, his presence there was extremely instrumental in provoking a kind of political revolution, because he gave his first lecture at the Rex Theatre, which was this magnificent Art Deco theatre in downtown Port-au-Prince, which is now destroyed, unfortunately.
And he spoke of Haitian poverty in extremely colourful terms.
His comments were reported by the student newspaper, which was a somewhat surrealist-influenced student newspaper at the time called LaRouche.
The editors were then arrested and the newspaper was impounded.
Which provoked a student strike, which provoked a general strike, which then provoked a general political upsurge, and the government was in fact overthrown.
So in 2015 I went to Haiti actually as André Breton in a certain way, so everybody there thinks my name is André, in a sense to sort of somehow kind of relive this sort of surrealist history, and I delivered a new series of lectures on surrealism.
It was very, very interesting.
I was walking around Port-au-Prince in a suit for a month, and I have to say that one does and is forced to shed certain ideas, let's say sentimental ideas, about these kinds of environments when you're faced with a situation in which really about these kinds of environments when you're faced with a situation in which really people are very interested in you, in your foreignness and in your potential for maybe
in your foreignness and in your potential for, you know, maybe, you know, helping them in one way or another.
And so, yeah.
And this is...
How do you fund these things?
If my son said to me, Dad, I'm going to be a surrealist poet...
I think I'd say, son, you really need to rethink your career path.
Actually, what do your parents think about what you do?
Well, I mean, I don't have too much contact with them anymore.
But I mean, I also make money in different ways.
I work as a translator sometimes.
I write an opera for the Deutsche Oper.
I'm not from a working class background.
Oh, blimey, you are quite versatile.
Were you writing an opera?
Yeah.
In German?
It was in English.
Right.
What other languages do you have?
I speak French, German, a little bit of Greek and Latin, and some Hebrew and some Arabic.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
So, what you...
So you do a bit of Surrealist poetry, you do a bit of translation, a bit of opera writing.
Anything else that I should know about?
I mean, I've done a lot of things, but it's also not so interesting to me, the things that I've done in a certain way, and I think that it's like a kind of...
You know, I mean, I prefer to relate to people on a more...
What you're doing now?
Yeah.
Well, tell me, because I re-came across you, having not seen you since 2017.
You're having some kind of crowdfunding thing.
That's right, yeah.
Tell me about that.
Well, for legal reasons, I really can't get into too many specifics.
Yeah.
But it's to do with the politics of so-called cancel culture...
Briefly, I hear this phrase, this has got to be about the last six months this phrase has come out.
What does it mean?
Well, it essentially means a kind of digital lynch mobbing of various individuals on the basis of perceived ideological crimes.
It's often accompanied with the production of insane allegations.
This sort of Very determined effort, basically, to destroy people's lives, to no-platform people, to prevent people from speaking, to prevent people also from defending themselves.
And the mechanisms that are going into this...
I mean, LD50 was an example, actually, because it was...
You know, first they invented a lot of things about it, then they sort of hounded it from the scene, as it were, and then nobody else was allowed to speak about it.
So it's a kind of contagious witch craze, actually, is really what it's about.
And it's about groups of people, actually often relatively small groups of people, orchestrating sort of hate campaigns against different individuals.
I think it has a kind of political language which is associated with it, but I think that actually its deepest impulses are not necessarily political.
I think they correspond to something deeper, something more psychological.
A certain kind of psychology of the witch hunter, you could say, who...
Let me put it like this.
If you're interested in a certain kind of sadism and you want to pursue it, then what you're going to do is find language and a justification that enables you to do it.
And I think that's what's going on with cancel culture.
Actually, it's people who are really into the idea of canceling others, of telling others what to think, of what they're not allowed to think, of who they're allowed to know, of who they're not allowed to know.
And they're justifying it through this kind of, you know, social justice.
Taking the moral high ground while simultaneously indulging their sadistic fantasies.
Absolutely.
And the reason why it works is because this kind of social justice ideology has been enthroned, basically, on the highest levels of institutions.
And so there's a great line by Hegel where he says, you know, the monks formed, as it were, the standing army of the Pope.
And so basically what's going on with cancel culture is you have sort of freelance inquisitors, basically, who are responding to incentive structures that are being created by the culture as such.
And then are pursuing individuals and scapegoating them in a certain way in order to resolve the tensions that I think are becoming very, very clear now within these kinds of structures.
So, what we're doing is we're bringing a case against one individual who's been particularly aggressive in pursuing a kind of campaign strategy.
Of cancellation against a number of different individuals.
You being one of them.
Myself being one of them, but not the only one, actually.
And there are quite a few others as well.
And what we want to do with that, actually, is to also to, in a way, draw a line in the sand and say that it's important that just unfounded and defamatory allegations are not allowed just to circulate And that also people who are in a way empowered with responsibilities for managing institutions have to show a lot more backbone in their dealings with the internet because what's also going on and in a way the reason why this is working
is because you have a certain kind of a coalition between I would say very aggressive and even quite sadistic individuals on the one hand who are sort of outside the institutions and putting pressure on them On the other hand, extremely weak individuals who are inside the institutions who are responding to these kinds of pressures.
And because basically these people are so risk-averse that they're making decisions on the basis that, well, I don't know if it's true or not, but we don't want to get involved with anything that looks bad, basically.
This was even the case with this podcast, that I was quite wary of speaking to you because I thought, well, what if he's a Nazi?
And here I am actually embracing the mindset of the people I absolutely love, the people who randomly vilify perfectly innocent people with tags like the The Nazi tag or the alt-right tag, which used to be...
I mean, I used to think of alt-right as meaning simply alternative right, meaning kind of on the Trump train kind of thing, kind of wacky memes, being funny and stuff that the left doesn't...
But then the left, with a bit of help from Richard Spencer, subverted that so that it became alt-right equals Nazi.
But you're right, we're all paranoid now.
Even my own people, even conservatives, I'm sometimes concerned by the degree to which they are prepared to throw people like you to the wolves or even not engage with you just because they perceive that there might be some risk.
I think that's cowardly.
It's definitely cowardly.
It testifies to extreme lack of moral backbone, I would say.
The deeper background to all of this is in a way in which symbols are used and taboos are mobilized.
And so what we sort of somehow have today is a kind of reactivation of all of the symbology of, you know, World War II, basically, which has been kind of dredged up as an almost like last-ditch defense, I think, of a political elite which has become increasingly distant from the principles of its own legitimacy.
And so basically it's attempting to repeat itself.
Like Mark said, you know, first time is tragedy and the second time is farce.
It's attempting in a way to refight The Second World War in 2019 and to manifest this sort of grimoire of, you know, just sort of terrifying enemies as if the alternative, as if the only alternative was between the sort of managerial elite that we sort of today have or,
you know, Joseph Goebbels and the SS. But the truth is, actually, I mean, if you look around, I think it's very clear that There aren't actually too many people who are really interested in white nationalism, for example.
What you have instead is a lot of people who want to hold the political elite to account one way or another, or even simply don't necessarily want to go along with it.
And these people, who are actually the majority, are being comprehensively demonized by this sort of logic of paranoia.
What they're doing is they're picking off the wildebeest on the outside of the herd In order to scare the other wildebeest into lying.
This will happen to you if you speak out.
And in your case, your Jewishness is no defence.
The fact that you are the enemy of the Nazis, the victim of the Nazis, presumably they think, well, you're the wrong kind of Jew.
In fact, you're not even Jewish because...
Well, I mean, to be honest, like, I wouldn't also necessarily want to defend myself on that basis, although, you know, I mean, a lot of my decision-making does come from a certain kind of reflection on, I suppose, what God tells me to do, to be honest.
But the...
Principles, I mean, are quite specifically outlined by Saul Alinsky when he talks about in Rules for Radicals, like what you do with your political enemies.
You want to isolate them.
You want to scapegoat them.
It's a manifesto for witch hunt, actually.
And this is, I think, what we're basically dealing with.
We're dealing with a kind of like witch craze form of power.
What's interesting to think about is the relationship between the witch hunt and the witch because, of course, it's not the case, actually, that, for example, if you go along with it, you know, the witches are eliminated.
Quite the contrary.
The larger the witch hunt grows, actually, the more demand there is for witches, the more witches that there have to be.
And the reason why is because, in fact, It's not as if the witch hunt is trying to eliminate the witches.
It's actually trying to produce more of them because it's fueled by them, which is also why you burn them.
It's a machinery of sadism, basically, which operates by sacrificing individuals At the margins of society who can be sacrificed.
And from the point of view of people who are motivated by these kinds of psychologies, that's a very exciting thing to do.
And these are the people that we're basically dealing with.
We're dealing with these people on the one hand, and we're dealing with a very, very weak center on the other hand.
And it's a very dangerous situation, actually.
So people who I'm sure will want to support your crowdfund, because actually, if we don't fight back, we are stuffed, aren't we?
How do they find out about your fund?
Where do they look?
Well, I can...
Maybe I can put it in the notes to the...
That's probably the easiest thing to do.
But, I mean, it's on...
It's on crowdjustice.com and my name is DC Miller.
This was actually my stand-up poetry name.
Yeah, DC Miller.
Because you need a slightly showbiz name in this kind of...
Yeah, or like D.C. Berman, who was a great poet, actually, who recently died.
Look, Daniel, I've really loved having you on the podcast.
It's been a surprise and delight, because I wasn't sure which way it was going to go.
And you're clearly a very erudite, thoughtful fellow.
I just wish that I could speak to you longer.
I've now got to go off and do Douglas Murray.
But thank you very much for being a fascinating podcast guest.
I do hope that you have luck in your crowdfunding.
May I just remind, before I go, may I just remind the special friend?
October the 5th, the Podcast Live Festival.
You've got to come.
Dick and me.
I'm so excited about it already.
It's going to be really, really good.
I'm sure Daniel would be there if he knew about it, which he's only just heard about.
But it's going to be brilliant.
I don't know whether the dog's going to be there, but there are going to be competitions.
Definitely the yes-no game.
I think probably there's going to be the Remain Leave game.
Don't forget also, if you can, bring along a celebrity.
There's going to be a competition for the most famous person and the most obscurely famous person.
It may not work if you will fail me, but maybe it will be good.
Anyway, thank you for listening.
Thank you, Daniel Miller, DC Miller, for a great podcast.
And yeah, speak to you next week.
Bye.
▲
Export Selection