Thursday, February 26, 2009

Forever Young

Hey, Hey, My, My
Critical Theory will never die

Another bunch of disaffected academics who claim that they are “beyond theory” set up camp sometime around the turn of the millennium, this time in architecture, but the gripe is aimed at the usual suspects: Frankfurt School Marxists and French Post-Structuralists.

For lack of a clever name, people call it “post-criticality.” Its basic desire consists in wanting to make art while engaging in commerce, to give up the idea that artists and intellectuals are hostile towards money-making institutions. The suggestion is that all the talk of alienation and critique is the fault of philosophers who have convinced regular artists that they should not like mainstream culture, i.e. the place where the money is.

You can read about this cluster of post-critical thinkers in the hippest architecture journals. Last Year Harvard Design Magazine had a piece by David Hickey, called “On Theory: ‘Post-Criticality and Death by Academics.” Hickey is considered cool because he dropped out of academia in the 60s but knows all the theories and writes in a low-key chatty style, like an old philosophy professor having a seminar on the back deck before getting a beer.

The smartest, and most frustrating, aspect of post-critical writing is that it refuses to sound smart. A lot of the time, these guys summarize theory debates with laconic one-liners, Walter Benjamin is just “dopey.” We are all supposed nod and smile.

There is something deliberately down home American about these simple statements. It is also a hip, insider way of talking. German Marxists are just so uptight. You need to have seen the right movies and then you get it.

In Perspecta, another cool journal, Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting explain the difference between Critical and Post-Critical Architecture as the difference between Robert De Niro and Robert Mitchum as actors. De Niro is all intense Method-acting, always showing off how much work goes into his character, while Mitchum is utterly laid back in his bad-boy occupation of a role.

Cool, it’s cool to be cool. This is Facebook Theory. Like the guys in grad school who always have a running joke about this band and that movie. When you see the band, hear the movie, you realize that they are pretty cool, you like them, too, but you wonder if there is more to it.

And the point of theory, of every philosopher since Socrates, is that there is always more to the picture than meets the eye.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Just another murder

How do you write the article about your own murder? Reporters covering the acquittal of low-level suspects in the contract killing of Anna Politkovskava recount that she would easily have described the farce that was her murder trial—the suspects that no one seriously suspected of having committed her murder, the surprising disappearance of the surveillance video from her apartment building—a video that had been broadcast on most major European networks. What is most impressive: that a grand jury let the defendants off, this in a land were 99% of those charged are found guilty. Anna Politkovskava who was so familiar with the tricks of that regime, would have not been surprised. In some sense you have to admit that it is impressive that the poor Schmos who got set up for the murder managed to drive away from the court house. What is to say that two Chechen brothers should have expected such luck? Another twist of fate.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Snow Theory Sources

A model of intellectual life, forced on you by weather, geography and the fortunes of war.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

"At that time I was in Germany, where I had been called by the wars that are not yet ended there. While I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my thoughts."

Carl Gustav Carus, Neun Briefe über Landschaftmalerei, geschrieben in den Jahren 1815 bis 1824

Der Schnee rieselt naßkalt am Fenster nieder, tiefe Stille umgibt mich, im Zimmer ist behagliche Erwärmung, und die in den langen trüben Abenden des Vorwinters zeitig angezündeten Lampe verbreitet anmutiges Dämmerlicht um mich her. Gewiß zu solcher Zeit kann nichts freundlicher sein, als in ruhigem Sinnen Gedanken Raum zu geben, welche um Gegenstände der Kunst sich verbreitend, uns nach und nach so ganz in die Gebiete des Schönen hinüberziehen, daß wir die trüben Tage vergessen und dem Gedächtnis jeder frühern unbequemen Stimmung entsagen.

Eating Smoke

The national rise in obesity is the consequence of not smoking. If we all still had firesticks to warm us in the evenings, we surely would have coughed all those extra calories away. Surely someone has come up with an epidemiological study comparing the rising and falling rates of lung cancer and obesity. Long dull evenings were always made tolerable by the cycle of wanting and enjoying which cigarettes provided every half hour. Whatever else was going on around you, soon you could have a cigarette. This addictive logic has not disappeared, it has merely been transferred to snacks, drinks and the internet.

Weather or not

Here at Snow Theory central, we are very concerned about the discourse analytical implications of weather.

Everyone talks about it, as Mark Twain quipped, but the real point is how they talk about it.

Weather forecasting is one area in which modern society still indulges in superstition. We may not be as fanatical as citizens of Constantinople, but all winter long we let dubious tricksters jack us with the possibility that a wintry mix will keep the kids home, slow the commute. We are not so different from those ancients who ran to the corner temple to find out if the dark cloud formation meant that we should sacrifice a chicken instead of offering three silver coins to the local weather deity.

The answer depends on the priest’s, i.e. station manager’s, agenda, do you want to cook chicken for dinner or do you want to go out to eat, or more precisely, are you pushing stuff left over from the President’s Day sale or last year’s Dodge inventory? Weathermen are the low-end shamans of modernity, they are either clever and ugly, or pretty and witless. They succeed because they claim to have local knowledge: “snow here in the tri-state area.” They invent new geographic terms for their viewing audience, “a cold front moving through the mid-state valley region.”

The very uncertainty of their predictions means that we always have to stay tuned. Sometimes they emphasize how tenuous their forecast is, “more at eleven, check our web site for updates.” Their real accomplishment is turning vague information into advertising cash, and that is most definitely doing something about the weather.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Med Man

SO tell me what am I missing about Mad Men, The first episode was cleverly self-referential with its trying to figure out the next Lucky Strikes campaign, the men were stylish for once, martinis everywhere, suits looked sharp, deception was a sign that everyone could get rich, even the misogyny was fascinating--how do people even think like that? but by episode three it was depressingly about the misery of Connecticut suburbs, the cocky office guys, the merely manipulative, the stupidly deceptive, I grew up in the seventies with everyone talking about the misery of middle class respectability--not that I had any, but I ask, so why the fascination for it again? A few pages of Cheever and Updike will suffice should the heart yearn for Potemkin men and psycho moms.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Political Skin/Stimulating Fingers

As the Republican Party and its supporters retrench after their defeat, the appeal to ancient values finds new words. Racist insinuations are among the many things that have changed since Obama became president. Fox News reported today that there would likely be no Republican “fingerprints” on the stimulus package, so that in the next presidential election four years from now, the bill would be a matter of “Obama’s political skin.” Overtly this means the stimulus bill is Obama’s political skin in the sense that his continued success depends on its actually stimulating the economy. The phrase also allows the Fox viewer to substitute the bill for Obama’s skin. If you don’t like one, the knowing looks implied, then you won’t like the other. Obama’s presidency is forcing racists to invent new connotations for old phrases. Not wanting to vote for the stimulus bill is comparable to not wanting to touch a black man’s skin was the message. This combination of refusing liberal spending in the name of refusing contact with black people may have been around a long time, but it is now being directed not just against the downtrodden but also the president.

Teaching for the middle

One of the basic strategies that educators, political advisors, radio programmers and movie producers use is to aim their message for the middle of their target audience, if you are a school teacher, you focus on the lower half of your class, with the assumption that the top quartile will take care of itself.

Once upon a time, the mantra was for excellence and gifted programs, but now the safer strategy is to formulate a message that will easily appeal to the largest subgroup.

For decades, Hollywood films have been marketed towards young men with the assumption that women will also buy a ticket if their guys want to see the show.

In radio that means endless classic rock, because in large markets you only need a small percentage of listeners onboard in order to make advertising profit. Three percent of the market and you are doing well, so all you need is some mix of old tunes to get the necessary audience.

Nevermind the forty percent of listeners who are completely ignored by the station programmers. It takes too much effort to develop a play list for them, maybe because they have a diverse range of interests, maybe because their tastes don’t boil down to a simple profile.

In my small academic town, the public schools seem to assume that professors' kids will do just fine, so the curriculum is aimed at kids who do not have PhD parents. This then reinforces the ancient divide between geeks and jocks, town and gown. If you can get the football fans interested, then the chess players will figure it out for themselves.

Similarly, the end game of any political campaign follows much the same logic: the endless pursuit of the undecided voter, those handful of people who after months of campaigning have not yet figured out where they stand. In the last months before an election, political discourse, ads, speeches, television commentary, etc, are all aimed at the lowest possible common denominator with occasional glances at everyone else to see if they are still onboard.

In the end, the best you get is the song, movie, class, or policy that you can tolerate, and the hopeless hope that the next one will be more to your liking, in other words the basic principle of early MTV.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Nouveau Medieval

As the older generation of medievalists is stepping off into retirement, the middle-aged pack of scholars behind them are daring to wander back into that supposedly dark period. We are not suddenly becoming medievalists, and we certainly are not engaging in philological work but suddenly we see the delightful possibility to ride rough-shod over the period with our out-of-context pomo theories. The vacuum is just too tempting. If the Nibelungenlied is no longer drawing together graduate seminars, perhaps we more modern scholars should and could take a look at those older texts, a naïve, out of context with no real language training glance, one that says, “Hey Hartmann von Aue is pretty complex, a little like Kafka.”

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Dead Nazi War Criminals

It is one thing to acknowledge the banality of evil, it is entirely another thing to let evil escape into everyday dullness.

The New York Times is filled today with a long story about Aribert Ferdinand Heim, a doctor wanted for war crimes committed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The Times articles refers to the research done on the case by the German television network ZDF, and indeed if you go to their web page [www.zdf.de] you can see an hour long interview with the son about his contacts with his father as he was hiding in Cairo. Heim died in 1992, and just now his hiding place is being made public.

The first half of the interview begins by establishing how the son, Rüdiger Heim, grew up to become an eighteen-year old curious to learn what had become of his absent father. An aunt helps him meet his father in Cairo. He explains that it was difficult for him as a long-haired hanging out in Italy, listening to Dylan and The Who, to get along immediately with his father. We are left to imagine what an old Nazi doctor thinks about his son, the hippy.

It does not take long for the present day Rüdiger, sitting in front of the camera with two younger reporters, to step into the mold of old, settled West German leftist, a familiar person, easily understood by the television audience. After about 20 minutes the interview turns to the war crimes: what did your father say about the charges?

The interview makes clear that when political and public events are diverted into personal experiences, the discussion becomes constrained by the conventions of polite human interaction. When they are talking in someone’s living room, outsiders feel unable to challenge that person. Watching Rudiger Heim explain how he found his father in Cairo, we see a middle aged man calmly explain how repeatedly visited his father. He has presumably retold the tale in stages all his life, yet we nevertheless see how difficult it is for him reveal his ongoing interaction with his hunted father. Only in passing does he mention that after the first visits in the 1970s that he did not see his father for most of the 1980s. There seems to be a lot behind this comment, but we get no follow up. Whatever qualms the son had, whatever confusion, love, rage against his father, all the stuff of the student movement, we are told nothing.

I missed in the first half the empathising aggression of American journalism. "Was it tough for you growing up with the knowledge that your father was a war criminal." "Did other children tease you?" "How did you reconcile your own politics with your father's?"

Even as the son lets his own caution down, the reporters fall even further into the conventions of polite conversation: let the other person get it out, don’t push the confession, it should flow from its own accord. The conversation looks like therapy.

Confessions have their polite conventions, like any other conversation. The reporters encourage Rüdiger Heim. They show their sympathy through nods and even-handed tones. No one moves their body. They stay absolutely still. Turn only their heads, not their torsos. Wave their hands at the wrist, but not the arms

After a while the conversation revolves more around the familial tension, the son defending his relationship to his father while at the same time putting forth his own criticism of his father

By the end of the hour we are at the war criminal's own death, his health problems and whatever happened to his property. These are the ordinary topics about the last days of any elderly Westerner: what kind of cancer did he have, what kind of treatment did he receive, what was the radiation therapy like.
The son even acknowledges how typical the last years were when he states that cancer in a 77-year old man will lead to death within two years, anywhere in the world, even in a hospital in New York.

After the first hour, the interview peters out, Aribert Ferdinand Heim ends up sounding like anyone else. That may well have been goal but it is also the failure of this interview. It is one thing to point out that Nazi war criminals are like other Germans, other people, but another thing to let them become like any other dead uncle: so familial, that they are not even uncanny anymore.

The Book of My Enemy

Ran across an hilarious poem by Clive James that has been circulating. Writerly resentment in a ditty.

'The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered'

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.


The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.


Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".


Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.


Clive James


link:http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html
first found at http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Day the Music Died

This being the fiftieth anniversary of the plane crash that sparked the song, it is hard to remember that once upon a time rock and roll music was a fragile thing, in the hands of a few artists whose death might have brought the tender movement to an end.

It takes imagination to revive that lost feeling of insecure rebellion, of teenage tragedy, the fear that it might all be over with the death of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.

Now, the music that mainstream radio stations refused to play is all they play. Remember how you never heard Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin on the radio back in the 1970s? Is there anything else today?

Perhaps we could let the music rest in peace? Let it die with whatever tragic dignity rock might still have left. It clearly can never regain the dorky youth that Buddy Holly represented, but does it have to live on like a David Bowie vampire?

What a fantasy to think that the whole rock era could really be over, replaced by something else, not necessarily a new rebellion, just a sound from another corner, one that is not yet fully owned?

No, at this point, the death of rock music is just a perverse fantasy, an impossible hope.

That having been said, I can't stop listening to the Arctic Monkeys

Monday, February 2, 2009

Halftime

OK, so Springsteen’s half time show was so awful that all his efforts to inoculate himself against fan criticism only makes the disappointment greater. As if he knew it would be terrible, and he was just covering himself ahead of the show. He joked that he was promoting an album, which is why he finally did the show. This was like the Sex Pistols reuniting for their “Filthy Lucre” tour.

Once upon a time, U2 seemed to have just gotten away with ironically referring to themselves as a corporate band, Springsteen is the same, but he utterly lacks the guile and irony to have it both ways: to espouse working man’s integrity and to make a quick buck.

Speed was indeed the problem.
Springsteen presents himself as not just selling out by giving really long shows in which he seems physically wiped out by the end. This makes the show look and feel like heart-felt work. The halftime show did not allow for that kind of balancing act, and so it looked just like a quick buck.

You could say he refrained from playing “Born in the USA” for fear that it would come across as just a nationalist anthem at the Super Bowl. OK, so he gets something for that, but the gratuitous Disney endorsement just left one with a sick feeling in the end.