I am continuing my course on music, and we are up to the fugue. As I said a week or two ago, it seems to me that Versailles is a powerful and relevant symbol, but not for what one would normally assume.
The French rebelled against a King and God. They did not rebel against the order and harmony that Versailles represented. On the contrary, I think one must see in the Gallic mind as it exists to this very day an instinctive–and, as it were, atavistic–fondness for the “music of the spheres” conception of the universe that Versailles represented.
Everything and everyone in its place, “scientifically” ordered. Is this not what Socialism/Communism, with their overarching bureaucracies and purportedly rational controls represent? Did Marx himself not label Communism “scientific socialism”, a phrase later invoked by Barack Obama Sr. in his most famous published work?
If you look at the conception of the French banlieue, they represent a spatial organization that is meant to connote and imply order, planning, a smoothly flowing society. They don’t operate as such, of course, since our world in reality is chaotic in a formal sense, but that is the aesthetic conception.
Socialism, the fugue, and Versailles are all of a piece. “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”.
The Sun King still rules in spirit, n’est ce pas? All hail his magnificence, in the form of Marxist ideology.
I truly believe this is right. This is the cognitive counterpart to the fundamentally psychosocial outcomes of intellectual decadence I have labelled, depending on how far advanced it is, either Sybaritic Leftism or Cultural Sadeism.