January 2009
Mass Strikes Planned in France
The Guardian:
The protests reflect a mood of social unrest that has been building for months. Unemployment had dropped in the first half of last year but it is now spiralling, particularly among the young, and is forecast to reach 10% in 2010. The recession is predicted to be worse than thought while flagging exports and consumer sales have hammered the manufacturing sector.
The strike will unite private and public sector workers from schools, hospitals national TV and radio to postal services, bank clerks and supermarket employees. Even helicopter pilots and staff from the company that operates the French stock exchange are taking part. High school pupils, university lecturers, lawyers and magistrates will also protest a raft of Sarkozy’s reforms and planned job cuts. Despite the predicted chaos, one poll found that 70% of French people either support or sympathise with the strikes.
Das Kapital: The Movie
Kluge’s monumental “News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital” is a 570-minute film available only on DVD which is based on the work of two other montage artists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. These two met in 1929 to discuss filming Marx’s “Kapital” which had been written 60 years beforehand. Now, eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way.
Was will das Weib?
New York Times Magazine asks the sexologists. (Via Larval Subjects.)
Hypo-critical Theory!
An article—perhaps even a manifesto—titled “Preoccupied” just came out regarding the New School occupation, which occurred last month. Here’s a quote that I got from Jodi Dean that I think gives voice to some of my own apprehensions about academia:
To defuse spontaneity, have a meeting. Then another, and another. Wait ten minutes, and then start over. This is the logic of the radical liberals. Ashamed of the failures of the 60’s, they seek to relive its worst moments and rectify them in the present, as if that would bring honor to the cemeteries which house their dead. Every site of conflict is deemed counterproductive, and every moment of possibility is deemed too soon. Believing that they are the true heirs to the “lessons” of the past, they smother the present with their dead language, providing false directions that lead only to entrenched stability…
Avoid them at all costs.
Via I Cite.
How Will Poety Fair in the New Depression?
A look at poetry in the economic downturn by ODALI$QUED:
Likely [the recession] means no more gluts of overprinted books of poetry and no more b.s. anthologies. Much of that side noise that had to do with c.v. fluffing will go dead. Those who are not totally, pathologically committed to poetry will probably stop writing, and writing about, poetry. I imagine in the urban literary centers, literary activity will fare a little better (for no other reason than poetry is good, free diversion); but those disconnected from the centers of power will be exactly that – disconnected – as travel becomes increasingly impossible.
Good news for poetry. There is essentially only an academic market for most small press books and they’re mostly published for academic advancement. If we want poetry to escape the chains of academia, we’re going to have to create a new market and write for reasons other than filling out holes in our resumes.
While one would suspect that this downturn would mean an increase of online publications, p.d.f. distribution, etc., the increased / centralization of even online resources will mean that only certain voices will be heard or noticed. The computers of the struggling and soon to be struggling will break, and often not be replaced. Home internet access will also, with tight budgets, go, as will, among the defeated, the will to engage in non-economically productive activity or watch others, with more privilege, so engage. There is a difference between what one thinks about poetry and online discourse about it when one is reading and writing from a public library computer and when one is reading and writing from one’s home.
Bad news for poets? Not necessarily. I’ll agree there is a difference when you are writing from a public library, but it’s not necessarily a bad difference. The constant connection to mass media created by a computer can be stupefying and numbing. The more separation a poet has from the mundane the better the poetry.
Evolution happens in isolated ecosystems. When I write recently I’ve been shutting off my internet connection and doing it by hand/portable typewriter in an attempt to create isolation. As ODALI$QUED’s said, “this is a chance for us to lose those tails.”
Anyway, library poetry could be what young poets need to actually start reading works instead of just incessantly writing.
Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem Makes a Bad Screenplay
Over at Intuitive Intertextuality, complaints about Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem using the term “pedestrian” are being rebuffed, and rightly so. However, the Amiri Baraka poem from a pedestrian perspective brings up an interesting point about Elizabeth Alexander’s point of view in the inaugural poem.
If the inaugural poem didn’t connect, the main problem was most likely a problem of perspective. Elizabeth Alexander chose to express the point of view of we: the general will in response to the moment. The strategy of this perspective is based on the belief that the best way to connect with a large and broad audience is to use a general perspective, simple language and a universal theme. The idea is that for the poetically uninitiated to enter the poem, the narrator must not be too peculiar, and the poetics must be minimized.
Paradoxically, the perspective of the everyman is a perspective no man is interested in.
Take a decent screenwriting course1 and you’ll quickly learn that a general character is an uninteresting character. Audiences are much more likely to respond to a peculiar, yet specific character than they are to a so-called everyman.
A better strategy for the inaugural poem would’ve been to present the poem from a compelling individual perspective.
This is what makes Amiri Baraka’s “pedestrian” poem, Something In The Way of Things, easy to connect with. There is no question that the narrator’s perspective is atypical, but that’s what you want from a poem– a unique…
The White House Is Cyberchic
During his campaign, Candidate Obama and his team of technically savvy young aides promised to harness the power of the Internet to allow the public easy access to government documents and presidential decisions.
It took six hours on Tuesday for the ordinarily fast-moving aides to Mr. Obama to post his executive orders on the White House Web site. Until then, the site declared, “The president has not issued any executive orders.”
They bought a scanner.
Tommy Gun
Note: For some reason embedding was just disabled on this video, but you can just click on the video box to view it on youtube.
Night Writing 7
Sheets of Glass
an acre of city with a pleasant person
singing songs about slavery as quiet
iron rises in a fungal form unable
to control the new world rivets
down the alligator spine
the hand of static intervention
tremors and reckons the base
interference at an unreasonable
level and the twelfth minute
feedsback a pulsing electronic organ
cow heart and a datsun battery
keeps my body red and turns my hairs
around on my body but I’m alive
and swelling in the cold air
and where I keep my hat
only the yield sign knows
and where I keep my sleeves
is out on the wind’s
Firing Line
red letter four before the time was right
in the short grass sucking hose water
off the Foundation’s land
in the back of the head
with a rope round the wrist
believe I won’t do it again
pull of a phantom hand
believe I won’t do it again
he keeps his mouth open
teeth jut out
his belief
right as broken wrist in wire
wrap and cigar smoke
a marionette’s stigmata
with joints that bend both ways
and dozens of features
so that he is a wooden
man in all contempt
pain that calls you close
The White House
In honor of John Gruber, I have this to say: great design.
David Schmid nominates Slavoj Žižek
As the USA’s first Secretary of Culture. I think I recall this happening before. See here:
Zizek was asked to consider becoming a [Slovenian] government minister in the mid-nineties, and declined. “The Prime Minister said, ‘Do you want Science? Culture?’ I told him, ‘Are you crazy? Who wants that crap? I am only interested in two posts - either Minister of the Interior or the head of the Secret Police.’” He was, however, made a kind of cultural ambassador for Slovenia, and was granted a diplomatic passport. He has since relinquished it. “I thought it would make it easier to travel, but it was the opposite,” he says. “I would try to go through with the diplomatic passport, and the immigration officials would look at me and think, What kind of diplomat is this guy? So it would take twice as long.”
Via 3QD.
The Poor People’s Campaign
It’s worth remembering which Martin Luther King, Jr. we tend to remember on MLK Day:
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
One can see why this version of King usually goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned by most liberals. (Via The Weblog.)
Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub…
I think it’s best to begin this series of book reviews with a negative review as it’s usually easier to distance yourself from an idea than to try to relate to a dozen. I’ll begin with Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.
Matthea Harvey’s poetry is impressive. She is obviously skilled, but her poems are intellectual counterfeit money. Despite her best efforts the poems strike only harmonious emotional strings with a focus on kitschy language techniques. At no point is there a threat of change, at no point do these poems challenge the reader and that is what makes them mostly forgettable.
The poems seem to suffer from a need to be beautiful, or worse cute, but my main complaint is that the poems are obvious and finite. The closing lines of the title poem might explain. After a short narrative about some men, women and bathtubs Harvey offers:
To define ourselves against even if we know that/Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out/Which is not the case with our own tighter confinementInside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too
If that poem were presented on a three fold presentation board she might have pasted “Conclusion” over those lines. Harvey’s sometimes compelling scenes and deft control of language are needlessly punctuated with these ridiculous interpretative statements. We are told what to take away from the poem, leaving no room for expansion.
Harey…
Rock Stars and Their Parents
The Zappa portrait almost takes the cake, but the junkie Clapton with his grandma steals it away.
Night Writing 6
Wireframe Accident
mice with handles scurry wired to their birds
heat that’s beating without chambers i can tell he is a liar
pickled eyes with terrible club and his grin
toy colors on her parade with lights
pulled across a single passage
police with wire faces held together
this kill is personal on the filament
he read enough to separate the pieces
he pronounced it like a doctor
his gremlin hands on the church shingles
his tar is not an engine
he moves the wind over the streets
everyone stays indoors
turns the stubble into splotches
picking lead out of the pencils
dressed up in a formal tie
and into a door up the float
what angels nobody deserved this
so much grit under their fingers
little angels underwater
Burnt Plastic
harmonic reduction of the yellow bridge
brave water calls it down rivet irons
urging down the birds are growing on her
orator’s scene down in the water with the hair
set up antenna channel over headless life
coral reef made of infrastructure
we used to be so pretty
risen from the threads
we used to breath on our professors
pick the parts off their lapel
pick the struggle of their fingers
the fish who want to eat
up the office on the wall
His…
Zizek, Lenin, and Kierkegaard
In an ongoing debate with John Holbo (of The Valve), Adam Kotsko has this to say regarding Zizek and democracy:
… Lenin is suspending the ethical from two points of view—he’s violating liberal democracy, obviously, but he’s also violating the supposed “natural” course of events dictated by Marxist theory. He has no guarantees, either of liberal proceduralism nor Marxist progressivism. That is the aspect of Lenin Zizek finds most appealing, not some bullshit about broken eggs automatically leading to omelettes. The whole point is that Lenin has no guarantee…
He’s talking about being willing to take a risk, being willing to take steps that within your present “normal” frame of reference may even seem despicable. Now there’s the Jack Bauer version of that, being willing to torture, etc., to save the system (the same might be said of Bush, or indeed of Stalin)—Zizek’s clear that that’s not what he’s after. He’s talking about taking a risk in service of revolutionary change… Zizek already knows that the results of revolution aren’t guaranteed and can be quite ugly. He was born and raised in a communist society, for example. So the whole Gulag Archipelago thing was pretty pointless, especially given that Zizek’s opposition to Stalinism has been a constant.
Death to the Tinman
This is the best Wes Anderson movie he didn’t make.
Ray Tintori is a 24-year-old director from Brooklyn. “Death to the Tinman” was his undergraduate thesis film for Wesleyan University’s Film Studies program. The film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it received an Honorable Mention for Short Filmmaking. It also played in the South by Southwest Film Festival and New York Film Festival, among others. His previous film “Jettison Your Loved Ones” premiered at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival. Mr. Tintori currently resides in New York where he is writing his next film, as well as writing scripts for other people’s major motion pictures, and directing music videos for pop groups like MGMT.
Kant and the Problem of Interpretation
Mikhail at Perverse Egalitarianism once again manages to articulate what I have wanted to say:
The issue of thing-in-itself is the most confusing one when it comes to explaining Kant and therefore it seems the most confusing one for those who subsequently attempt to get away with formulating Kant’s position in a couple of sentences. Now, I do enjoy a sort of a swift philosophical generalization that mentions names and implies that they stand for well-established and uncontroversial positions: Kant said that apples are bitter, yet Hegel developed this idea to talk about grapes, while Heidegger flips it upside down and talked about chairs - you know what I mean. I think it’s important to have a perspective like that, to have an ability to survey the history of philosophy and to make conclusions, but my problem has always been the kind of a nagging question: how can you say “Kant” and somehow signify the great complexity of Kant’s work and post-Kantian discussions?
There is, to be sure, plenty to criticize in Kant’s thought, but it seems entirely unproductive to uncritically accept the doxa regarding interpretations of his work and use that as a basis of opposition. What this doesn’t mean, again, is that it would somehow be impossible to criticize Kant because his thought is “so complex” that we could never truly comprehend it and any reading would therefore be a kind of reductionism and miss the mark.
But it does require a reader to perhaps dig a little deeper into the text by negotiating with the contradictions and other aspects that do not cleanly fit into the established common-places and “undergraduate”-level readings. Mikhail gives the example of the unclear status of the noumena, which obviously should not be confused with the Thing-in-itself, as any reader of Kant knows, and I would also like to add to that the similarly unclear status of transcendental objects, just as an additional example.
The Stooges Are Gone (!)
A devastating musical loss that I didn’t pick up on until today. Ron Asheton, the Stooges guitarist, is dead, and so the band is finished. At least he got some of the recognition and redemption he deserved over the last few years with the Stooges reuniting.
Here are the Stooges on TV in 1970:
You should also check out Asheton talking about JFK.
Night Writing 5
Retire at the Hedge
a cardboard house with “yeah”
on the side in paint
where I can call everyone I know
they see me waving down there
once you know my face
my head always looks bigger
no matter how far away you are your head looks the same size
in a mirror so at a certain point the reflections you see are just pupils
the unlit swimming pool behind your congenital lenses
beside a fat colony
with “i know” on the side
where everyone calls me
slim and counts on me
to fix their boilers
running hot
until I forget to come one day
next day the entire furnace is orange
seems to have melted into a depression
like a disney toon
filled with bopping mutts
howling into anything shaped like a victrola
eating anything that lets them
cause I’m like mickey mouse
Many Frequencies Equal Intensities
that whirling glass carnival
that plays beyond the curve
that comes out at wrong angles
that lets you hear it before it goes back
sounds like the rats are clean now
sounds like the clown has character but he’s not colored in
sounds like a filament without a switch
that plays an ice cream tune
that lets him come in your door
that…
On the Inherent Stupidity of All Content
I was just checking out Graham Harman’s blog a little further (which I highly suggest for our readers to do as well), and I came across this post that gets at something that I have been having difficulties articulating. Harman writes:
But I’ve always been suspicious of the smugness with which people say: “I prefer substance over style.” Because there is a sense in which the substance is the style. People have just gotten in the bad habit of thinking of style as a gaudy surface ornament tarting up honest, humble truths– with empty showboats focusing on the former and serious people on the latter. Somehow, that’s a distortion of what’s really going on. There is something reprehensibly shallow and connivingly selfish about anything or anyone that is style-less.
I’d like to simply add too the way in which style and logic overlap and how questions relating to the logic of a text sometimes offer far more interesting analyses than directly analyzing the contents of what someone is saying.
The Overdetermination of Differences
In response to my loosely thought-out comments and criticism on his notion of the “hegemonic fallacy,” Sinthome has this to say:
Of particular importance in this connection are Latour’s Principle and the Principle of Reality. The Hegemonic Fallacy doesn’t deny that some differences dominate and overdetermine other differences. Rather, it denies that all differences can be traced back to a single ground or origin that contains them “virtually” as Hegel’s category of Being already contains all the subsequent categorical determinations…
Latour’s Principle states that there is no transportation without translation. According to this principle, if we can speak of entities like capitalism or class, then we must be able to discuss how these entities are assembled or put together. How does class come to be an entity? How does capitalism come to be an entity? If this question emerges, then this is because capitalism and class must transport itself to other entities and this requires translation or labor. That is, the entities cannot simply be subsumed like so many variables in a mathematical function. Moreover, those entities that are enlisted or assembled by these “super-entities” often resist and have other ideas…
I’m not really sure I agree with Sinthome’s remarks on Hegel here, but what he has to say about translation and transportation (and, for that matter, the contrast between structures and assemblages) is definitely something that interests me and hopefully I can comment on it further in the near future. Also, I think Graham Harman’s blog overreacts to my comment, which was limited to Sinthome’s reading of Kant (and, to an extent, Lacan).
Anyhow, I have some other thoughts that are in the comments section of Sinthome’s post. If you’re curious, you can read them there.
A Night in which All Cows are Black
In responding to Mikhael at Perverse Egalitarianism, Dr. Sinthome addresses my same question about how the proliferation of difference would not in some way result in no difference:
I agree that we must avoid a “night in which all cows are black”, where we can only speak of chaos or noise without differentiation. I have spoken of this often on my blog. However, the thesis that there are many different types of differences or that there are a plurality of differences is entirely different than the declaration that there is only chaos. Following Bergson, I hold that chaos is a sort of transcendental illusion where one form or order is measured by another form of order and found lacking of that order.
By way of example as to what I’m getting at with the Hegemonic Fallacy, I simply want to avoid those forms of thought where, for example, it is held that everything about a person can be explained by their DNA (another form of the Hegemonic Fallacy). DNA, of course, contributes an important difference, but so do rates of development whereby proteins reach one another, the availability of materials in the environment for the assembly of cells, the altitude at which a body develops, etc. Likewise, not only does DNA make a difference, but the body that develops in part based on a particular set of chromosomes also makes a difference that can’t simply be reduced to DNA. That body is dependent on its DNA but
…
Nip/Tuck is Back on the Air
And I forgot how amazing it was. The first of the new episodes, “Ronnie Chase,” is up on Hulu (via link). The second is available on MiniNova and probably a bunch of other torrent sites (or you can try and catch the reruns on FX).
Biz Markie’s Bennie and the Jets
Biz Markie doesn’t owe anyone an apology.
Jackass of the Daring Fireball
John Gruber owes Dan Lyons an apology. There are several other posts he should retract or apologize for after today’s sad news about Steve Jobs. This is petty shit, but it should be said.
Simple Modernism
Ads without products asks:
What sort of play would Oedipus Rex be if it didn’t locate itself right at the crucial moment, the moment of anagnorisis and peripeteia, retroactive revelation and reversal of circumstances? What if bad things happened, but nothing changed. Or no one knew (or allowed themselves to know) that the bad things had happened. What if the bad things - at least these bad things - had never taken place, either because they didn’t happen or for one reason or another they were not “bad.”
I especially like the perspicuous conclusion about modernist narratives:
When I claim that preoccupation with the everyday is one of the defining characteristics of modernist narrative, I mean the everyday that takes place in lieu of or in resistance to the event. Or even better, the everyday is what takes the place where we would normally expect to find the event - the historical event, yes, but more specifically - technically - the action that turns and in turning provokes reflection that is the most fundamentally characteristic gesture of narrative itself.
Towards an Object-Oriented Philosophy
There’s been a flurry of fascinating posts over at Larval Subjects recently on the subject of object-oriented philosophy. I found Dr. Sinthome’s post on how to overcome the “Kantian paradox,” as it were, particularly of interest:
We are given the alternative of either living inside a submarine known as mind, tradition, language, culture, or society, where we only ever encounter the world through the mediation of our “sonar machines” (i.e., in a way that fails to represent them as they are, or of directly touching objects either themselves. We are given the stark alternative of mind or world, culture or nature, language or object.
Yet this stark alternative misconstrues the entire problem.
I decided to leave the quote on a cliff-hanger to encourage readers to check out the entire post on the so-called “hegemonic fallacy,” as Sinthome dubs it. But his other posts are also worth checking out.
I don’t really have that good of a grasp of what Sinthome is talking about, as I’m not at all familiar with Laruel or Latour, but it seems that if we accept the premise that “all difference makes a difference” (by reducing all difference to a horizontal “plane of immanence”) against the idea that there exists at least one difference that, to some extent, determines other differences, then this conclusion seems to run perilously close to saying almost nothing about difference itself. Meaning, if we can’t say that some things matter more than others, then at the philosophical level it seems to make difference identical to itself and at the political level to foreclose the possibility of radical politics.
But, again, these thoughts are purely speculative, immediate reactions to the post, and are in no way rigorous critiques or well-thought out to any extent.
More Deranged
If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything… It’s what makes, I think, photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.
—Errol Morris
Poetry and Book Reviews
You may be wondering why strange words seasoned with line breaks have been appearing on the Velvet Howler. That’s poetry and starting this month I’m going to be posting draft poems for my newest project.
Each month, I intend to produce a full length (fifty to seventy five page) manuscript of poems to be featured on a special section of the Howler. In addition to my work, I’ll also be offering reviews of Pittsburgh poetry events and my neophyte commentary on poetics.
The Howler is also going to feature book reviews by me, Bryan and other contributing writers. These will be similar in format and length to what you would read in the paper and will cover a wide range of subjects and publishing dates. I intend to mainly review poetry and I assume Bryan will focus on nonfiction with the stray Pynchon thrown in for good measure.
You should expect about twenty draft poems a week from me and a weekly book review from each writer.
Night Writing 4
Pittsville
what color is that expression
red like a slapped peach
down below the grating
slack stick cuts out
bam dink bam dink dink
might as well be a noose
what symbol does carnegie hold
a stop sign, a yield sign, a searchlight
naked like a computer technician
late at night and trotting all around
trot aloud like it’s a radial line
that’s driving all this steel down
in Pittsburgh
where my white and green
make the chrysler building
shave up the side
step out the top
who are we kidding
it’s a big dick
with hollow logs
filled with steam
burning up the agencies
menopause directors
burning up the clowns
in the cafeteria with fiddles
and two fingers
Who’s Got The Last Laugh Now
mean moments picking off the rows
turning with the shot and make the sailor
suck down a glow stick
little fish head earning wings
ugly singers with braids
dark horse hair brushes
on paul’s beaver helmet
even the sweaters
have hides inside
and you’d swear it was
a nickel in your pocket
but it was a european dollar
with portuguese interpretations
this honeycomb is a bopper
like a middle name you cut open
to fry your hands and a teaspoon of oil
and a teaspoon of shortening
and a teaspoon of butter
see through muscle man
tending drinks with his left
on the back of your leg
leather seams indented
a cigarette name backwards
could be sonny bono
but…
Could Joe the Plumber run for Senate?
Oh God, I hope so.
Woody Allen’s Film Diary
Woody Allen has a hilarious piece in the Guardian on the making of Vicky Christina Barcelona.
Offered role to Scarlett Johansson. Said before she could accept, script must be approved by her agent, then by her mother, with whom she’s close. Following that, it must be approved by her agent’s mother. In middle of negotiation she changed agents - then changed mothers. She’s gifted but can be a handful.
A Sderot Woman Speaks out Against Gaza Operation
From Assaf’s diary at the DailyKos:
Not in my name and not for me you went to war. The current bloodbath in Gaza is not in my name and not for my security. Destroyed homes, bombed schools, thousands of new refugees - are not in my name and not for my security. In Gaza there is no time for burial ceremonies now, the dead are put in refrigerators in twos, because there is no room. Here their bodies lay, policemen, children, and our nimble reporters play acrobatically with Hasbara strategies in view of “the images that speak for themselves”. Pray tell me, what is there to “explain”?
(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
Bill Moyers on Israel/Gaza
(Via 3QD.)
Funeral Home Fire in Squirrel Hill (Pittsburgh)
I shot this video from my apartment window of a fire across the street from where I live. There were five fire trucks, and flames shooting out of the top of the building.
A little background:
Last night around 9:30 PM, a car crashed into a telephone pole, taking out three transformers and causing everyone to lose power on the block for several hours around Murray Ave and Forward Ave in Pittsburgh. Power was restored around 11:00 PM.
This morning I woke up at around 7:20 AM to a fire across the street at the Burton L. Hirsch Funeral Home and the building behind it. Two fire trucks were coming down the block, five in total eventually arrived. It’s 10:15 AM and the fire is still going, though it’s under control at this point. You can also check out a picture I shot for KDKA. I don’t believe anyone was injured, and most of the local news stations seem to be reporting the same thing.
I can’t help but think one event had to do with the other considering how close that house was to the power lines and explosions from the transformers, but I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t flare up until the next morning.
Update 10:28: The firefighters have stopped hosing the building from Murray, but there are open flames that I can see on the second floor of the building. At one point there was no flame visible and they stopped…
The Costs of Ideological Correction
Matthew Yglesias has a great post on “moderate” ideology:
In the United States, slavish adherence to “moderate” positions is often construed as exhibited “pragmatism” that’s in distinction to the more “ideological” views of people with less centrist views. In fact, moderation can reflect ideology ever [sic] bit as much as extremism can. I’ve had occasion to observe in the past that they best model for recapitalizing distressed financial institutions is provided by Sweden’s response to the early-1990s Nordic banking crisis. And nobody seems to seriously dispute that the Swedish model worked very well. But it’s too left-wing for the United States for basically reasons of ideological correctness.
Check out Yglesias’s full post for graphs comparing Pete Stark’s proposed healthcare insurance coverage and the estimated change in national health expenditures for the proposal. I’m not that interested in the ins-and-outs of congressional politics (although the chance to reform national healthcare to resemble something closer to the European welfare-state system is definitely an important issue), but I think the case Yglesias gives is definitely true as a more universal principle in relation to the distorted way in which American politics and ideology work.
Casino Capitalist Cinema
Why is it that movies like Scarface, Boiler Room, and Blow—movies that are intended as “critiques” of lavish, exotic, and—in most cases—violent gangster and Wall Street lifestyles (what one might call “casino capitalist aesthetics”)—often function as the opposite in the eyes of their fans? Rather than conceiving of this as a subjective error on the part of the fans, I think the argument could be made that it’s actually a problem immanent to genre itself—that is, as an objective feature of its internal logic.
Although I haven’t given it much thought, I think that it might have something to do—following Zizek—with the way in which the relationship between the Law and its obscene “superegoic” supplement are represented in the films: in these cases, transgression/”sin” appears as something entirely external to the Law, rather than as another moment of the same dynamic. Consequently, in all of these films, transgression—whether it be in the case of drug trafficking or underhanded wheeling and dealing—acquires the characteristic of perverse jouissance that masks its constitutive function of the Law.
It seems that, although these films each ends in generally the same way (the illegal operation is subverted by the symbolic Law and the protagonist is forced to come to terms with the big Other—though Scarface has a slightly more interesting twist), the aforementioned viewer/fan generally ignores the outcome or sees it as part in parcel of a tragic pathos of transgression, a kind of “casino capitalist ethics.” So, again, what you end up with is…
Political Theology in Gaza
Adam Kotsko in An und für sich:
[I]f some group has been victimized by another group, that gives them the right to victimize an uninvolved third group… So applying this principle to the Gaza situation: Israel, having inherited the victim status of European Jews — a victim status that reached the highest possible level in the Holocaust — is justified in victimizing the Palestinians. On the other side, if the Palestinians decide to fight back, they are deprived of the opportunity to be considered victims who are defending themselves; they must always be considered aggressors. Elite U.S. opinion understands this, which is why we get, at best, a “pox on both your houses” response even though Israel unilaterally breaks ceasefires the overwhelming majority of the time. And why shouldn’t the U.S. feel a close bond with Israel when we have both benefited from our knowledge of this same biblical principle?
The link to A Tiny Revolution contains an interesting quote from The Huffington Post:
We defined “conflict pauses” as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. [It] is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.
Night Writing 3
Runway Clip
in a waterproof jacket with no shoes
and a moral to certify
he ran down like bee bee guns
and furnished several apologies
after bread we broke down the table
learned how to write ampersands
with grace and skill
monsters
all over town the sheets of numbers
were torn off because it was so grand
to think of what was being sold
how it would be bought
and never sold again
scratched down with pennies
when the tin was gone
so was the theater but we kept the lights
redirected planes
tot the sloping hills behind
the picture frame
hot glass roasting like thick cigars
on the cover of a magazine
about lips
You Andy Warhol Kid
Pulling up the turf
and down and down
racist pugs in rich positions
big empty fish tanks
where the chef wades
and the fake rocks go between his bubble toes
within minutes a cow is gone
and in his place i get born
but my bangs never grow out
so i have to take a bad job
in a country western funk band
you could write down
exactly the sound
in dead language
in churches where old women worship
they’re trying to take them away
be on your bent out…
Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?
Zizek responds to Kirsch’s idiotic TNR piece from awhile back. Unfortunately for the world, Kirsch actually responds back to Zizek—this time arguably even more idiotic than before. His argument, not unlike the first one, basically consists of a series of hilariously out-of-context quotes that are meant to appeal only to people who haven’t read, and perhaps never will read, any of Zizek’s work. Kirsch is reduced to stupidly repeating himself like one of those embarrassing talking-head encounters on television as it’s clear that he has no real argument. Via 3QD.
Žižek and Democracy
I decided to re-read Žižek’s response to Laclau in Critical Inquiry (Schlagend, aber nicht Treffend!), which was included, in part, in In Defense of Lost Causes. It occurred to me while reading the article that I had overlooked, or perhaps not taken as crucial, Žižek’s major contribution to the twin critiques of the political economy and ideology. It’s obvious that Žižek’s stance is anti-capitalist, but so what? Obviously, as Dr. Sinthome points out in his recent article on the universes of discourse (which I’d like to respond to soon, once I finish at least), one has to make the distinction between Žižek-for-himself—as he understands his project—and Žižek-in-himself—as his project should be conceived implicitly, without regard to how Žižek consciously conceives of it—but this passage struck me as something crucial:
As someone who has written abundantly on overdetermination and articulation, he should know what structuring role means, namely, that class struggle is the overdetermining principle of articulation of the multitude of emancipatory struggles, not their actual content. (I myself give a clear, although, for Laclau and many others, problematic example of it when, in my work on Lenin, I claim that in today’s constellation the primary focus should not be on anticapitalism but on undermining the fetishist status of democracy as our master-signifier; as Badiou recently put it, “Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy.”)
If we take Žižek seriously here—that is, take him at his word—the key to his project is not limited…
Colleges and Banks: A Match Made in Heaven
This seems like one of the more seedy relationships forged over the recent decades. Colleges, especially public universities like Michigan State University or University of Michigan, which has rather unseemly ties to TCF Bank, should obviously not be promoting the production of consumer debt. The interests of the university are allegedly to educate, but it seems that when the universities become profit-maximizing businesses geared primarily towards boosting “endowment”—as most have become—they lose sight of this objective.
Of course, this isn’t to say that the university has ever solely been interested in “objectively” educating students, as if one could speak from such a neutral position (although this is exactly what most universities try to obfuscate). As Althusser already famously pointed out in his analysis of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), one of the major goals of the university is to systematically reproduce the relations of production. The production of student consumer debt seems to simply be the neoliberal extension of this very same logic, in which the university became “deterritorialized” and “reterritorialized” via its integration into the market economy.
Night Writing 2
The Color of My Cheeks
the windows were colder to the air
and the little sack of life was in my arms
so that I was an unwed mother
and this child does not have the capacity to feel
so that the tight curls on the shoveler’s face were mosquito coils
burning the air that was warm to the face
the glass’s grain was unbelievable again
straight up in the air
400 tons of slavic steel in cubic centimeter
gnarled into an impossible knit of heatless factories
where the music gets louder because the metal seems irrelevant
to the desire of the pummeler and a hundred men with triangle hammers
smooth out the bumps
the pills don’t work and I blame the rug
because I have glasses now and my hair
would look best in a 16mm reel in millimeters
but who am I fucking around with this stupid song in the air
we all gotta die someday because the pills don’t work
From an Admirer
hear the carrots eating worms and diffusing
by what you might call luck I ran across
your particular brand of cynicism (read:scribblings)
and sir I must say it burns like STD cream
and I must say that you would make a lovely daughter
my first love was of course the brass flute
the way a handle…
Night Writing 1
Cup of Salt
the panders singing of my glasses
cuts my hand like being two
the passage run between the sisters
Oh, I just don’t know for sure
And wasted like a Jung out lady
I whistle only drums cast in steel brown eyed symphony brown eyed symphony
The hand that bears the cast carries on
grit is weighing down its tendons
Just the muscle and a chown upon degree
Just the neighbor being beat on again
Browning the loin on a grinder chain
dance, dance my orphan monkey
piercing subjects with our television
the brim is wider than a pair of strangers
HOLD ON TO THE WET ARM
LIKE IT AGAIN FOR SABIAN
purse whatever comes may disagree whatever comes may disagree whatever
and the water glass is like her figure
let me squeeze enough to unpolish the marble
Let me bend enough to challenge the structure
And return it to sand with my harmonic intentions
The Hellwalk
make the widow in my room come with out crying on the sheets
make the weather by my window cool thirty seven degrees
make the vessels in the continuation of incessant existing mammals
boil over and dry like dinosaur creations
make my wig strong and florescent a gas that’s on fire
make a gas that’s on fire lose…
A Day in Vienna with Tom Waits
A short documentary that follows Tom Waits in Vienna for a day. If you don’t like the performances, it’s worth it for the Somewhere Over the Rainbow saxaphone story alone.
Free Market Myth
It’s easy to get lost in the haze of discourse surrounding “deregulation” in the wake of the financial collapse, but Dean Baker makes an excellent point, which is that calls for “deregulation” are rather ideological covers for new regulatory measures aimed at distributing wealth towards the top. On the subject of drug research and manufacturing, Baker writes:
When we sweep away ideology, we see that it is a debate between two regulatory strategies for keeping drug prices down.
Baker’s argument, which makes sense to me, is to focus less on the fig leaf of “deregulation” and instead to target who benefits from regulation. Once the myth of the “free market” is put aside, the battle over deciding who benefits is certainly a battle progressives can win. Via A Tiny Revolution.
Universes of Discourse
I haven’t finished reading it yet, but Levi Bryant (of Larval Subjects) has a really fascinating article in the latest issue (Vol 2, No 4) of the International Journal of Žižek Studies titled “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist.” Here’s the abstract:
In what way is the thought of Slavoj Žižek to be distinguished from that of Jacques Lacan? This paper argues that the thought of Lacan and Žižek are to be distinguished at the level of the formal structure of discourse. Although Žižek often situates his own theoretical project in terms of the discourse of the analyst, his work occupies an uneasy place in this position insofar as the discourse of the analyst is directed at the singularity of the subject’s symptom, rather than shared political causes. Drawing on his “Milan Discourse” where Lacan presents the discourse of the capitalist, this paper argues that Žižek discourse inhabits the universe of capitalism, rather than the universe of mastery. Through the development of a modified version of Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist, it is shown that it is possible to derive three additional discourses– the discourse of biopower, the discourse of immaterial labor, and the discourse of critical theory –from the initial discourse of the capitalist. A psychoanalytic approach to these discourses using Lacanian discourse theory goes beyond standard accounts of biopolotical production and immaterial labor by revealing the function of the unconscious and real at work in these discourses, thereby opening new possibilities of engagement. Žižek’s theoretical project is shown to be an important cartography of this new universe of discourse, revealing both how the discourses inhabiting this universe contain certain constitutive deadlocks and devising strategies for engagement where the foe– due to the disappearance of the master and new forms of capitalism that can no longer be properly situated in terms of the discourse of the university –is no longer entirely clear.
(Via Larval Subjects.)
Happy New Years, Jerks
In addition to spending the next few weeks accidentally writing “2008” on all of your planners and whatnot, you should also visit the 366 Songs library now that Mark has successfully finished this huge project—the longest album ever made!—which began exactly a year ago on New Years day. The last song is Caffeine Mania, so give it a listen.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for some cool new projects that’ll begin soon.