December 2008
Bedtime Stories
Might be worth seeing just for the sake of an easy psychoanalytically-informed ideology-critique.
Happy War on Christmas
To celebrate this year’s continued secularization of Christ-mas at the hands of gay fascists and half-breed Muslins, here’s some Christmas history:
During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.
That’s right, you Monarchists. (Via 3QD.)
Goo-goos
Paul Krugman on why “conservatives” cannot, by definition, govern well:
Needless to say, the Bush administration offers a spectacular example of non-goo-gooism. But the Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right.
It’s the borrowed kettle.
The Enigma of Bruno S.
Pretty great story, especially if you’re a Herzog fan.
“Greek Syndrome”
The Independent (UK):
Europe exists, it appears. If Greek students sneeze, or catch a whiff of tear-gas, young people take to the streets in France and now Sweden. Yesterday, masked youths threw two firebombs at the French Institute in Athens. Windows were smashed but the building was not seriously damaged. Then youths spray-painted two slogans on the building. One said, “Spark in Athens. Fire in Paris. Insurrection is coming”. The other read, “France, Greece, uprising everywhere”.
Check out more about the Greek riots here. (Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
UPDATE: Adam Shatz in the LRB:
On 16 December, ten days into the unrest in Greece sparked by the killing of a 15-year-old boy by the police, a group of Greek students occupied the National Broadcasting Network. Interrupting a report on a parliamentary address by the prime minister, they raised a banner that read: ‘Stop Watching – Everyone on the Streets!’ Those who joined them would have missed the footage broadcast the same night on Al Tsantiri News, in which hooded men were seen smashing shop windows in Athens with iron clubs, then a short time later chatting amiably with the police. Al Tsantiri (a play on Al-Jazeera) is known for sending up the news in the style of the Daily Show, but this wasn’t a joke. The footage confirmed what many Greeks already suspected: that the government was using agents provocateurs to increase the violence and discredit the protests.
(Update via 3QD.)
On the Right to Food
A good thing to keep in mind this Christmas as the U.N. takes a vote. Here are the results:
In favor: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Against: United States.
(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
Christmas Fiends!
It’s that magical time of year when you cuddle up with Dan the Elf and fear the Christmas Dragon. Make this year special again, with Christmas Fiends! the sequel to the massive international seller Christmas Peel. Entertain your friends & celebrate these grand days of stocking stuffery.
Tracklist:
- Little Red St. Nick (feat. Jenny “Santagold” Armstrong)
- Good King Wensenslaw
- Shapoloid
- Christmas Island
- Loving You
Preview a track:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Act now and receive the original Christmas Peel, absolutely free, while supplies last (download).
In a spooky mood? Like your holidays Tim Burtonized? Try Halloween Peel (download).
Ann Arbor: Public and Private Space
My apologies for the slow blog week. I have been tirelessly working on the first two chapters of my thesis, of which I’ve completed about two-thirds of. Anyhow, now that classes have ended I can relax a bit and begin to post on the Howler with greater frequency (at least for the time being). Tomorrow I’m leaving for Atlanta, GA, and so I’ve been walking back and forth across campus in order to get my stuff packed and ready to go.
One annoying thing that I’ve noticed is that, perhaps as a result of certain purely “virtual” changes in the city’s political economy, all sorts of spaces are being transformed. More chains are moving in to “public” university space, such as a Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the student union. For a while, there hadn’t been any major fast-food chains in the city, especially on campus, and so it’s weird to see these things appearing en masse. Moreover, multi-million dollar apartment complexes keep appearing out of nowhere, especially as the university tears down old buildings. This summer, the city government lifted a tax that was placed on Hollywood studios, which made it more expensive for them to shoot films in Ann Arbor. Not so anymore—and the virtual changes have entered into “concrete space” with the appearance of dozens of movies being shot on campus.
But the most hideously extravagant and indulgent piece of architecture is—by far—the new business school, which I am sure will contribute its fair share…
Shaviro on Biopolitics
From The Pinocchio Theory blog:
Can I dare to suggest (without being denounced as a “self-hating Jew”) that such a focus on the Holocaust, on the Adornian lament about the difficulty (or impossibility) of poetry (or anything else) “after Auschwitz,” is at this point, 63 years after the end of World War II, an obscurantist evasion rather than a moral imperative? Not only is Esposito’s focus upon Nazi thanatopolitics blindly Eurocentric, but it also fails to take account of the many forms racism, nationalist chauvinism, etc. have taken around the world in the last half century and more. The politicization of “life” and the management of “life” have become all the more pervasive and ubiquitous in the last half century, precisely because of (rather than in spite of) the discrediting (for the most part) of Nazi racist/nationalist themes. For instance, bigotry and genocide today tend to be expressed in “cultural” and religious terms, rather than in the terms the Nazis used; but these new terms are themselves related to how we have come to reconceptualize “life”…. And questions about agriculture and food production, about access to water and other vital resources, about the patenting of genetic material, about the use of biometric data to track both individuals and populations, and so on almost ad infinitum — all these are excluded from Esposito’s purview, largely because his reductively Eurocentric and Holocaust-centric view of the biologization of politics and the politicization of biology has no room for them.
Capitalism as Religion
Benjamin from No Useless Leniency:
1. ‘capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed’. Capital is a system of religious beliefs and practices with ‘no specific body of dogma, no theology’. We could link this to the arguments of Zizek, Pfaller, and Santner that capitalism qua cult is a materialised set of ideological rituals. As the pure mechanism of accumulation it can have no theology or dogma per se (although it may have temporary forms of such theologies), because these would potentially disrupt a purely cultic veneration of objects - as objects of production / consumption. Capitalism is concrete (captured in Don DeLillo’s anecdote, in White Noise, concerning the sense of feeling blessed when one’s estimation of the balance of our bank account is revealed as accurate by the ATM.
I’d like to point out too that the bailout money used to buy up bad credit has lost somewhere around $9 bn., and who knows how much of it is being used to line the pockets of Goldman Sachs executives. If that isn’t a cultic sacrifice at the altar of the God of Capital, I don’t know what is.
In Defense of Irony
From the comments section at infinite thøught:
Zizek is a raving theory-fiend who spends his spare time building models of concentration camps out of matchsticks, and populating them with figurines of characters from Hitchcock movies. His publications have a sinister, mesmerising power which enables them to turn otherwise decent people into fanatical communists, slavering with blood-lust and restlessly prowling the halls of academia in the vain hoping of finding some kulaks they can liquidate. Also, he talks very quickly in a faintly humorous Eastern European accent, and our informants in the former Yugoslav Republic tell us that he was personally responsible for everything unpleasant that has ever happened in that otherwise moderate and convivial region. His beard should be burned and his books shaved, and his legions of sycophants should be given Cognitive Behavioural Therapy until they realise it’s time to grow up and get proper jobs.
This is a 100% reliable summary, and you now do not need to read anything by Zizek, ever.
I had intended on writing a long response to Jodi Dean’s post on Zizek and the New Republic hit piece, which seems like it came out forever-ago. Because of that, I won’t now, but all the same I think it’s worth pointing out how reading Zizek as an ironist does not constitute some sort of perverse attempt at turning him into a philosopher-clown who makes jokes and therefore can’t be taken seriously—as if irony and activism were mutually exclusive (and…
Imperfect Freedom
The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoe at President Bush was recently beaten and tortured by the police, which the Times Online UK heralds as a great achievement for democracy. To quote Lenin from Lenin’s Tomb:
It claims that the protest “demonstrated how far Iraq has come”, and that Iraqis “have learnt to enjoy freedom of expression.” It would be redundant to go through all the ways in which this disgusting reverie constitutes both a moral and intellectual insult. But one has to wonder: if a Times journalist was bleeding internally, with broken ribs and a smashed arm after suffering a severe beating by police, would its leader column be waxing wistful and ironical about ‘imperfect’ freedom?
I wonder how long it will take before our own government begins referring to Guantanamo Bay as a case of “imperfect” freedom?
Pride and Hysteria
I just finished watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet In episode 4, there’s a great scene where Eliza, after running into Mr. Darcy, leaves in a hurry by carriage back to her family’s house. The scene is weirdly intense and the camera angles begin to shift rapidly closer and closer to the clacking of the horses hooves and the bouncing carriage wheels, and at the same time a fantasmatic picture of Mr. Darcy appears before Eliza’s eyes, followed quickly by a cut to another scene as the pacing of the film (at least temporarily) begins to slow down.
I think it’s best to read this scene in the crudest way possible: as the climax of an orgasm. Interestingly, Victorian physicians used to prescribe bumpy carriage rides to women suffering from so-called “female hysteria.” Just saying.
Downtime
In the midst of studying for finals and what not, we forgot to pay our hosting bill. Whoops.
The Auto Bailout
So the auto bailout is now dead, again, for the seemingly hundredth time. According to TPM:
Dems were willing to agree to Republican demands that Big 3 employees move to wage parity with Japanese automakers operating in the US. But they wouldn’t agree to reach parity by 2009, as Republicans demanded.
Has the Republican Party become so politically marginalized that they’re now willing to openly acknowledge the fact that their policies are simply spiteful for spite’s sake and antagonistic to the interests of the working-class, especially unionized labor? I mean, it was always obvious that that was their intent, but they tend to veil it behind some phony grievance rooted in ressentiment.
That’s a Hot Mess, Gate!
Did you know that the phrase “Hot Mess” comes from old jazz slang? Popularized recently by Christian Siriano on Project Runway, the phrase is most commonly used in Baltimore.
It dates back to as early as the ’30s, with fellow Baltimore native Cab Calloway publishing the following definition in his New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive:
Mess (n.) — something good. Ex., “That last drink was a mess.”
Funny that old hepster slang has made its way into new hipster slang. Lingustic power!
Ball & Biscuit/Fever to Tell
This blog is now my own personal radio station. Here’s some more music: The White Stripes playing “Ball and Biscut” and then segueing into part of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Fever To Tell”.
Obama Campaign is Sitting on $30,000,000 Surplus
Instead of soliciting even more money from its record breaking support base, the Obama campaign should spend its reserves.
Why have I been getting two e-mails every fucking day asking for campaign donations when the Obama campaign has a thirty million dollar surplus?
For example, this e-mail from David Plouffe on November 20th:
I have a special request for you…. like in the campaign, we’ve decided to do things differently.
For the first time, transition efforts won’t be financed with donations from Washington lobbyists and PACs — which means we’ll need to keep asking for your help. Your generosity during the campaign helped get us here, but building a more transparent and open government means continuing to rely on a broader group of people to do this the right way.
…Will you help support the urgent mission of our transition team with a donation of $25 or more?
I think I’ll pass.
Examined Life
Astra Taylor, the director of Zizek!, has a new film titled Examined Life premiering at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival. It features Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. A short trailer is available at the film’s homepage.
Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.
Philosophers have long done their best thinking when directly engaging with the outside world, not in isolation from it. Socrates roved the Athenian agora, courting trouble with the authorities. Rousseau immortalized his rambles through nature on the printed page. Nietzsche once said that only ideas conceived while walking have any value.
In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.
You can also check out their Facebook group here.
Lou Reed on Songwriting
The first few clips from Elvis Costello’s new talkshow, Spectacle, are up and there are some great excerpts. Here’s my favorite clip with Lou Reed on songwriting:
EDIT: I can’t help but include this short clip where Bill Clinton explain why he didn’t become a jazz saxophonist.
The Last Word: Odetta
The New York Times has a fantastic lengthy interview and a sort of video eulogy of Odetta. She was incredibly honest and knew what was going on. (I’m going to pull a Daring Fireball and post liberally about Odetta now that she’s dead.)
Žižek the Ironist
Larval Subjects has a great response to The New Republic hit-piece put out a few days ago, which I suggest reading in whole, but here’s a small excerpt:
As an ironist, just when you think you’ve pinned down his position, he reverses everything and articulates yet another position contradicting the first. Hence the sense that he never gets anywhere. The paradox is that the more Žižek tries to disavow and undermine this position of being the subject-supposed-to-know, the more he tends to provoke transference in his audience, convincing them that he must contain some secret (just as Socrates’ interlocutors invariably thought that he knew and was just withholding the answer).
As Dr. Sinthome goes on to explain, Žižek’s key rhetorical tactic used to subvert conformist liberal democratic discourse is irony. This involves something peculiarly Žižekian, something that is palpable in every book he has written and every article he has published. The first move involves a rejection of the (typically hegemonic) liberal response to a given issue. One might think that, given Žižek’s political commitments, the next move would be to assert the far Left/Marxist view to counter the liberal position. Instead, Žižek often takes a stance that is uncomfortably close to the right-wing position, but then argues that the right-wing position simply makes a much stronger case for the far Left position.
In this way I think Žižek avoids the kind of dogmatic, ideological platitudes that are so often mistakenly attributed to him by his…