Can a blog be local, if that locality is something smaller than, say, Brooklyn, which has more than a few online writers dedicated to its peculiarities? Does the internet, like all media, concern itself primarily with its own terms? Can you step out of its flow to discuss the office building across from the old Lowes to an audience that will respond to the point as more than just a bit of local color? Of course, there are media whose transmitters are focused on smaller realms.
They have their very local inflections. Take the local public radio station.
Nothing says Central Pennsylvania so much as the high-pitched female voices on the Classical music show. While Haydn and Debussy are commonly introduced by baritone men with snobby pronunciation, around here you hear voices on the verge of hysteria as they try to sound harmless, as if listeners were nervous dogs or frightened babies craving reassurance.
One pundit suggests that it is the inflection of Amish speech that gives Central PA its soprano tendencies. Or do these siren DJs reflect the nervous cultural politics of a Classical music station in the rural isolation of a partying college town, uninterested in the dead musicians from before 1966.
I have met kindergarten teachers with more gravitas than the local announcers. Yet these voices have a regional texture, that is distinctly different the clichéd dialects and twangs that defiantly mark north and south, city and country.
These ear-shattering, local radio personalities harmonize with the general tendency to make culture cute. Beethoven’s music is presented with cupcakes and clapping. “We’re celebrating Mozart week today and for the rest of the month.” Again the grating kindergarten pedagogy.
The question remains dear internet friends: can this blog address these tones, without becoming hopeless out of sync with its own medium, with becoming unpleasantly local?
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
BioTheory
For the last few years some of the remaining luminaries of the theory era have taken a new approach. They talk about themselves. Their lectures are accessible, filled with reminiscences about their early career.
The grandiosity, the tendency for jargon to generalize remains in the habit of these speakers to equate their own careers with “the discipline.” When Gayatri Spivak or Fred Jameson chat, they define Comparative Literature through the arc of their own professional life.
Theory has become personal in a new way, it has become identified even more intensely with the names of its protagonists, yet this latest phase of biographical theory talk, the reminiscences of what it was like back in the day, gives the strongest sense that theory ain’t what once was, maybe it just ain’t.
In the last works of Derrida and Foucault, one might feel that they are looking back, but that impression could just as easily be our projection. Do the last volumes of History of Sexuality really express Foucault’s own self-understanding? Does a work such as Who’s afraid of Philosophy? recount Derrida’s place in France’s academy?
Still there is a fundamental difference between these works and the current round of old school stories. Most members of the theory fan club, waited eagerly for personal statements from their old masters. Who did not expect Derrida to confess, American-style, what his personal feelings about the Paul de Man revelations were? It took a while for people to understand that Foucault was never going to wear the t-shirt of sexual identity.
The old guard mediated their personality through their theory. They did not break down on camera or in front of three hundred acolytes. Derrida is cagey as ever in the documentaries about him. And while this reticence to speak publicly about their personal, to say nothing of their sexual, lives may seem quaintly old fashioned, old-European, it also shows a commitment to intellectual complexity, that their writing was not just a hat worn outside the house, but a constant habit trained into their every phrase--giving us the impression that the current autobiographical inclination in theory lectures is something of a slackening.
The grandiosity, the tendency for jargon to generalize remains in the habit of these speakers to equate their own careers with “the discipline.” When Gayatri Spivak or Fred Jameson chat, they define Comparative Literature through the arc of their own professional life.
Theory has become personal in a new way, it has become identified even more intensely with the names of its protagonists, yet this latest phase of biographical theory talk, the reminiscences of what it was like back in the day, gives the strongest sense that theory ain’t what once was, maybe it just ain’t.
In the last works of Derrida and Foucault, one might feel that they are looking back, but that impression could just as easily be our projection. Do the last volumes of History of Sexuality really express Foucault’s own self-understanding? Does a work such as Who’s afraid of Philosophy? recount Derrida’s place in France’s academy?
Still there is a fundamental difference between these works and the current round of old school stories. Most members of the theory fan club, waited eagerly for personal statements from their old masters. Who did not expect Derrida to confess, American-style, what his personal feelings about the Paul de Man revelations were? It took a while for people to understand that Foucault was never going to wear the t-shirt of sexual identity.
The old guard mediated their personality through their theory. They did not break down on camera or in front of three hundred acolytes. Derrida is cagey as ever in the documentaries about him. And while this reticence to speak publicly about their personal, to say nothing of their sexual, lives may seem quaintly old fashioned, old-European, it also shows a commitment to intellectual complexity, that their writing was not just a hat worn outside the house, but a constant habit trained into their every phrase--giving us the impression that the current autobiographical inclination in theory lectures is something of a slackening.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Zizek dislikes people?
Watched the Zizek documentary on Youtube. Easy to find, easy to follow. He goes on generating words, some brilliant, some incoherent. So this entry is an attempt to press pause on his tape, and figure out just what he means in one or two sentences. Let’s start with a simple statement:
When Zizek says that he dislikes people, that he hates them all, it really is not that simple. What he hates most of all is himself. People who praise him he despises because they do not recognize that he is worthy of contempt, so he speaks disdainfully of them because they have too easily fallen for the trap of his ceaseless talk. They do not realize that behind it all he is hiding from his own belief that he is contemptible.
He dares his audience to see this, his self-scorn manifests itself in his slovenly dress, his spitting speech, his general disregard for social form, --all of these traits are there on the surface of his persona as if he is daring you to dislike him because he is loud, obnoxious, disgusting. He is baiting you to dislike him, and those who take these bad manners as just signs of his genius are the most contemptible in his eyes. They are not worthy of recognition because they have not solved the trap that he has set for them.
He does not want to be debased, he wants someone to overpower him with their intelligence, to declare him stupid, ugly as he knows at base he is. His endless flow of theory keeps such criticism at bay. You have to wade through all the distractions to come up close to Zizek himself. The ordinary person who is intimidated by his speed and who dislikes him for his appearance is also contemptible in his eyes, for they have not even entered into the ruse that his speech presents, they do not even comprehend the game, and they have fallen for the obvious truth, too easily. He would prefer to toy with his self-hatred, rather than just be hated.
His speech is filled with fantasies of a totalitarian father, one who is not impressed by his discourse, one who like K’s father recognizes that his success is all fake, a father who can brush aside his son’s worldly acclaim to recognize him for what he is, shit. This requires a father who is not impressed by his son, who knows him better than he knows himself. Against this father Zizek would fight tooth and nail, he would become the frenzied dissident who attacks the regime endlessly until he is shot, because again he knows that is what he deserves.
Much of his analysis aims to bait authority, to make them come after him. If they do not, then they are not true totalitarians, which means they are again worthy of scorn and contempt. He would have had more respect for Bush if he had planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if he had squashed the first rumor of Abu Ghraib, if no one had ever realized what was going on at Guantanamo.
French theorists who dress elegantly, speak with rhetorical fluency he mocks, for they play an entirely different game. They are the Socratics who refuse to give you a diagnosis, they drive you mad with their open-ended pose, thus Zizek has to reduce them to philosophical principles. He gets past Lacan’s noncommittal lecturing pose, his challenge to the viewer to reflect for themselves about themselves, by reducing his speech to ideological statements. He shouts down psychoanalysis’s imperative that you look at yourself by turning queries into dogmatic statements that can then be applied against the father and any other authority, rather than at himself.
If Zizek ever read this, the first thing he would do is agree completely, then start deflecting away from himself by saying that this whole dynamic is all the result of authoritarian structures, which of course it is.
When Zizek says that he dislikes people, that he hates them all, it really is not that simple. What he hates most of all is himself. People who praise him he despises because they do not recognize that he is worthy of contempt, so he speaks disdainfully of them because they have too easily fallen for the trap of his ceaseless talk. They do not realize that behind it all he is hiding from his own belief that he is contemptible.
He dares his audience to see this, his self-scorn manifests itself in his slovenly dress, his spitting speech, his general disregard for social form, --all of these traits are there on the surface of his persona as if he is daring you to dislike him because he is loud, obnoxious, disgusting. He is baiting you to dislike him, and those who take these bad manners as just signs of his genius are the most contemptible in his eyes. They are not worthy of recognition because they have not solved the trap that he has set for them.
He does not want to be debased, he wants someone to overpower him with their intelligence, to declare him stupid, ugly as he knows at base he is. His endless flow of theory keeps such criticism at bay. You have to wade through all the distractions to come up close to Zizek himself. The ordinary person who is intimidated by his speed and who dislikes him for his appearance is also contemptible in his eyes, for they have not even entered into the ruse that his speech presents, they do not even comprehend the game, and they have fallen for the obvious truth, too easily. He would prefer to toy with his self-hatred, rather than just be hated.
His speech is filled with fantasies of a totalitarian father, one who is not impressed by his discourse, one who like K’s father recognizes that his success is all fake, a father who can brush aside his son’s worldly acclaim to recognize him for what he is, shit. This requires a father who is not impressed by his son, who knows him better than he knows himself. Against this father Zizek would fight tooth and nail, he would become the frenzied dissident who attacks the regime endlessly until he is shot, because again he knows that is what he deserves.
Much of his analysis aims to bait authority, to make them come after him. If they do not, then they are not true totalitarians, which means they are again worthy of scorn and contempt. He would have had more respect for Bush if he had planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if he had squashed the first rumor of Abu Ghraib, if no one had ever realized what was going on at Guantanamo.
French theorists who dress elegantly, speak with rhetorical fluency he mocks, for they play an entirely different game. They are the Socratics who refuse to give you a diagnosis, they drive you mad with their open-ended pose, thus Zizek has to reduce them to philosophical principles. He gets past Lacan’s noncommittal lecturing pose, his challenge to the viewer to reflect for themselves about themselves, by reducing his speech to ideological statements. He shouts down psychoanalysis’s imperative that you look at yourself by turning queries into dogmatic statements that can then be applied against the father and any other authority, rather than at himself.
If Zizek ever read this, the first thing he would do is agree completely, then start deflecting away from himself by saying that this whole dynamic is all the result of authoritarian structures, which of course it is.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Security Check
How to turn the experience we all hate into a money-maker.
A new nightclub in Manhattan, a second version soon to open in Berlin.
Everyone gets in the club, at least the advertisement says so, but they all have to get frisked and they have no say in who does it or how. Could be the big blond boy, could be the tall lady in grey. They will be fashionable, if you are not dressed appropriately you can be asked to remove your garment. If you are very offensive, you get taken to a small room to the side. Some get turned away but only after paying the cover charge. For their troubles they get a tattoo declaring their suspicious status.
Drinks are served in small 8oz bottles especially designed for the club. You get to mix them on your way to the bathroom. At least once a night there is an action, either a drive-by shooting or a suicide bombing. No one gets hurt but the feeling is realistic. Afterwards everyone gets to be on television to explain what it was like.
The club web site has a video of the night up by noon the next morning, complete with video surveillance of the frisking, the hallways and your reaction to the attack. No liability is assumed by the club. More details to follow
.
A new nightclub in Manhattan, a second version soon to open in Berlin.
Everyone gets in the club, at least the advertisement says so, but they all have to get frisked and they have no say in who does it or how. Could be the big blond boy, could be the tall lady in grey. They will be fashionable, if you are not dressed appropriately you can be asked to remove your garment. If you are very offensive, you get taken to a small room to the side. Some get turned away but only after paying the cover charge. For their troubles they get a tattoo declaring their suspicious status.
Drinks are served in small 8oz bottles especially designed for the club. You get to mix them on your way to the bathroom. At least once a night there is an action, either a drive-by shooting or a suicide bombing. No one gets hurt but the feeling is realistic. Afterwards everyone gets to be on television to explain what it was like.
The club web site has a video of the night up by noon the next morning, complete with video surveillance of the frisking, the hallways and your reaction to the attack. No liability is assumed by the club. More details to follow
.
Loving the Machine
Last Spring while teaching E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, we were talking about the protagonist falling in love with a robot, and I mentioned that this was one of the oldest motifs in sci-fi, then trying to update this Romantic tale, I mentioned, “like in Blade Runner.” Blank Stares, “You guys know Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford.” Blank Stares. I thought wow I really am getting old, I wasn’t expecting that anyone would know Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but not knowing a movie from the 80s with a big star still alive.
Time slips by. Grumbling around the mailroom in mock horror about the class and my own agedness, my colleague Eric Hayot, over at http://www.printculture.org/ tells me to throw Battlestar Galactica at them but I knew only the old 70s version. Now a year and many dvds later, I am worn down by the repeated shocking revelation that a character you thought was human is really not.
As everyone else knows, the show starts with the basic pattern: a supposedly intelligent man falls in love with beautiful woman who turns out to be a machine (or something like one). Yet, what works as a single shocking revelation in The Sandman, Metropolis and Blade Runner, is a reoccurring nightmare in Battlestar, pointing do the still fundamental differences between literature, film and television, which is obliged to deliver its surprises in installments even if we watch it on dvd. The show makes a game of it by letting us know well before all the revelations are in that there is a list of Cylons we thought were humans. Thus the horrific shock that drove Nathaniel mad in The Sandman is doled out over the course of several seasons.
Episodic literature tends to repeat. Even Homer’s Odysseus seems to land over and over again on the same strange island with new supernatural beings much like Kirk encountering new aliens on yet another version of that familiar studio-set planet.
The Uncanny that Freud first diagnosed while reading The Sandman has become more than just the return of a repressed desire, a familiar truth housed in an alien body. We are now faced with the uncanniness of the uncanny, we know that there will be revelations in which humans are shocked to discover their dearly beloved are inhuman, we know that this information will drive the tender, arrogant humans to madness, despair, drink and suicide.
So what becomes of the shock? Does it devolve into melodrama? Or is it a new trick to be mastered and then maneuvered around like an obstacle in Gameboy? How does knowing that a shock is coming become shocking?
Time slips by. Grumbling around the mailroom in mock horror about the class and my own agedness, my colleague Eric Hayot, over at http://www.printculture.org/ tells me to throw Battlestar Galactica at them but I knew only the old 70s version. Now a year and many dvds later, I am worn down by the repeated shocking revelation that a character you thought was human is really not.
As everyone else knows, the show starts with the basic pattern: a supposedly intelligent man falls in love with beautiful woman who turns out to be a machine (or something like one). Yet, what works as a single shocking revelation in The Sandman, Metropolis and Blade Runner, is a reoccurring nightmare in Battlestar, pointing do the still fundamental differences between literature, film and television, which is obliged to deliver its surprises in installments even if we watch it on dvd. The show makes a game of it by letting us know well before all the revelations are in that there is a list of Cylons we thought were humans. Thus the horrific shock that drove Nathaniel mad in The Sandman is doled out over the course of several seasons.
Episodic literature tends to repeat. Even Homer’s Odysseus seems to land over and over again on the same strange island with new supernatural beings much like Kirk encountering new aliens on yet another version of that familiar studio-set planet.
The Uncanny that Freud first diagnosed while reading The Sandman has become more than just the return of a repressed desire, a familiar truth housed in an alien body. We are now faced with the uncanniness of the uncanny, we know that there will be revelations in which humans are shocked to discover their dearly beloved are inhuman, we know that this information will drive the tender, arrogant humans to madness, despair, drink and suicide.
So what becomes of the shock? Does it devolve into melodrama? Or is it a new trick to be mastered and then maneuvered around like an obstacle in Gameboy? How does knowing that a shock is coming become shocking?
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Inauguration: Enthusiasm for the Enlightenment
More than a few people around here have commented that Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address constituted the return of the Enlightenment. His assertions of constitutional values, universal aspirations, the re-establishment of science as the basis for policy, even his scriptural invocation of putting aside childish things, reminded some of Immanuel Kant’s very definition: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” In other words, the childishness that we ought set aside was produced by those whom we let rule over us. It is not natural, but rather a stupor we let others induce upon us. (See, just thinking about the speech gets you writing complex clauses.) So the speech was marking the end of that rule and its accompanying immaturity.
Copying the President’s speech patterns is just another way expressing admiration. If Obama revived the Enlightenment, he did so by rallying a vast crowd, not the usual way of spreading rationalism. The thrill of hearing the inaugural speech was in being reminded why one had voted for him, that he is articulate beyond most speakers you hear in public, I worried that his earnestness will wear on people, that the public will in a short time want some happy news. He was wisely kept out of sight during the transition, so that his appearance revived the enthusiasm felt at the election, though this time without the immediate anxiety that it could all go wrong. Having been contested for the last two years, this time the revival of the Enlightenment was secured not only by debate and reflection, but by rhetoric, pageantry and the long-term stability of the government-- a touch of the baroque.
Copying the President’s speech patterns is just another way expressing admiration. If Obama revived the Enlightenment, he did so by rallying a vast crowd, not the usual way of spreading rationalism. The thrill of hearing the inaugural speech was in being reminded why one had voted for him, that he is articulate beyond most speakers you hear in public, I worried that his earnestness will wear on people, that the public will in a short time want some happy news. He was wisely kept out of sight during the transition, so that his appearance revived the enthusiasm felt at the election, though this time without the immediate anxiety that it could all go wrong. Having been contested for the last two years, this time the revival of the Enlightenment was secured not only by debate and reflection, but by rhetoric, pageantry and the long-term stability of the government-- a touch of the baroque.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Heroic Anti-Intellectualism:Stanley Fish in the New York Times
The latest Stanley Fish slam on the humanities reinforces the general impression that the New York Times likes the arts only if they are connected with business. http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
Heaven forbid that one should read, write, draw, sing or generally ponder and create for the sake of doing so. Intellectual endeavor that does not immediately involve generating income does not count in the paper of record. Universities exist primarily as stepping-stones in their readers’ careers, not as places where meaningful activity happens in its own right.
When the Times runs a skeptical Stanley Fish essay, administrators circulate the link among each other to reinforce their budget cuts. It was not even mid-morning before a colleague sent me the Fish piece as a justification for not organizing a theory conference. His argument is another version of the student who asks why study math, why take philosophy, its not going to get me a job. At its best Fish’s writing might be called Socratic, but his arguments easily transform themselves into a simple refusal to think critically and a recommendation that the young study only what will make them rich quickly.
What matters here is that the United States leads the world in turning universities into corporations, an agenda that further squelches thought and creativity for its own sake. It is certainly possible for a newspaper to be conservative, pro-business while maintaining a lively, even avant-garde, arts program. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Switzerland’s Neue Züricher Zeitung have impressive book reviews that dig deep into the literary scene, while the rest of the paper represents the concerns of the banking industry in both countries.
Academic and literary writing constitute one of the few arenas in which the NY Times trades in the long American tradition of anti-intellectualism. The paper may scorn ignorant politicians, but it relishes a no-nothing attitude when it comes to new developments in academic or literary culture. One of the few moments when the Times feels obliged to acknowledge academia comes when a famous professor dies. One need only read the obituaries of Jacques Derrida or Edward Said see how eagerly the paper sneers at philosophy.
Many bemoan the lack of public intellectuals in the United States, the New York Times, a paper that could readily set a standard, instead reinforces, even enforces, the silencing of complex public thought.
Heaven forbid that one should read, write, draw, sing or generally ponder and create for the sake of doing so. Intellectual endeavor that does not immediately involve generating income does not count in the paper of record. Universities exist primarily as stepping-stones in their readers’ careers, not as places where meaningful activity happens in its own right.
When the Times runs a skeptical Stanley Fish essay, administrators circulate the link among each other to reinforce their budget cuts. It was not even mid-morning before a colleague sent me the Fish piece as a justification for not organizing a theory conference. His argument is another version of the student who asks why study math, why take philosophy, its not going to get me a job. At its best Fish’s writing might be called Socratic, but his arguments easily transform themselves into a simple refusal to think critically and a recommendation that the young study only what will make them rich quickly.
What matters here is that the United States leads the world in turning universities into corporations, an agenda that further squelches thought and creativity for its own sake. It is certainly possible for a newspaper to be conservative, pro-business while maintaining a lively, even avant-garde, arts program. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Switzerland’s Neue Züricher Zeitung have impressive book reviews that dig deep into the literary scene, while the rest of the paper represents the concerns of the banking industry in both countries.
Academic and literary writing constitute one of the few arenas in which the NY Times trades in the long American tradition of anti-intellectualism. The paper may scorn ignorant politicians, but it relishes a no-nothing attitude when it comes to new developments in academic or literary culture. One of the few moments when the Times feels obliged to acknowledge academia comes when a famous professor dies. One need only read the obituaries of Jacques Derrida or Edward Said see how eagerly the paper sneers at philosophy.
Many bemoan the lack of public intellectuals in the United States, the New York Times, a paper that could readily set a standard, instead reinforces, even enforces, the silencing of complex public thought.
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