William Blake

The Michael Scot trail continues to lead in all sorts of amusing directions. I believe Scot's prominence in history, beyond academic treatises on medieval science, stems largely from his visibility in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy in turn gained quite beautiful illustrations at the hands of William Blake though sadly this project was left unfinished when Blake died. So when my wife and I found ourselves planning a trip south of the border a stop in Cambridge for William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum seemed obligatory. It would have been even without Scot.

The exhibition was a revelation, illuminating the radical humanitarianism underlying his visionary art. It sent me back to this long-neglected book where I lingered over the tale of little Tom Dacre who is sold to be a chimney sweep by his father when his mother dies. His life is miserable but he has a wonderful visionary dream of liberation in which an angel tells him that if he's a good boy, 'He'd have God for his father and never want joy.' The next morning:

And so Tom awake; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Blake would improve Tom's material lot but he's already in a better place spiritually.

Our world is very different from Blake's and most of us nowadays do not share his religious belief. In the world we've created for ourselves, doing your duty is no defence against great harm, maybe cast aside in some global restructuring exercise or suddenly finding ourselves guilty of some unimagined bureaucratic sin. Why should people buy into structures where you can do your duty and come to harm nonetheless?

K-Pop

I was fascinated by this account from the BBC: How jealous 'super fans' try to dictate their idols' private lives. Fans of the K-Pop group aespa are outraged to discover that singer Karina has a boyfriend. Karina has compounded the offence by apologising publicly rather than on a private, fans-only forum. She's only a girl in a band. Can't she have a personal life like everybody else?

A bizarre tale but it's the background that holds the attention, the personal involvement of the fans in the capitalistic project of the band.

"Fans put in labour to ensure the group's success. They consider the idol a product. And if you want to see the product on the stage for a long time, the artistes, the fans, and the management will all have to put in hard work."

We learn of "fan labour": streaming their idols' music, even at night while sleeping, to move them up the charts; studying the voting rules of the several fan polls; dividing their voting efforts to get their group as far up the rankings as they can; responding to negative comments in online forums.

Karina is not 'like everybody else'. She is a component of a corporate entity, filling a role that precludes a personal life. Her reality has to be that perceived by the corporate organism, not the human one she grew up with; just as other human components of such organisms need to abandon their human moral values to fulfil their functions. The striking K-Pop innovation is to transform the super fans from consumers to constituents. They also must embrace the reality perceived by the corporation, 'put in hard work' alongside artistes and management to help it optimise its position in the landscape it perceives, of money, charts, prizes. They don't need it for insight, balm, enlightenment, support... they need it to succeed. Its success, on its own terms, is their success. What a wheeze!

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Karina image: 티비텐, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons