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July 13, 2008
Jesus, what a shitty title. I don’t even really read DC comics, so why I even know who Gorilla Grodd is, is beyond me. Probably the Justice League cartoon.
Anyway, There are three things I thought worth writing about, hence no cohesive theme, hence the following clusterfuck:
1) My friend’s husband is a professional blogger - is that true? - and through that Facebook note posting thing, I was pointed to his latest article, which is about the vapidity of the Jezebel/Gawker people and their faux-feminism which is mostly a trendy pretension to fuck with abandon without having to take responsibility for one’s actions. I’ll explain more below.
I was first introduced to Jezebel and Tracie Egan, when a friend of mine posted something on a message board about Egan’s video podcast Pot Psychology, in which her and her friend get high and give (the worst possible) sex advice. This prompted me to create a Wrestling Team series called Coke Psychology, basically using the premise as fodder for nonsensical quasi-satire. And boy did it set the world on fire with it’s pointed absurdity! I sure took them down a notch. Anyway, this prompted me to start perusing Jezebel, not really knowing much about it or Gawker until I read Pazienza’s post above, but it looked like a way to waste time, and it was full of the kind of women I’ve been conditioned to desire, so yay for my libido. However, while the attractiveness of the women who wrote for it never got old, the brand of feminism quickly wore out it’s welcome. Jezelbel makes no bones about it, but it’s a pop-feminism site, one that trades real political action - or real political thought - for superficial kinds of things. What I mean by that is that sexual politics and sexual choice is reduced to libertinism with a thin veneer of feminism covering it (For every segment like Missdemeanors, where they take other gossip bloggers to task for their misogyny, there’s ten posts reinforcing Jezebel’s version of laissez faire femininity). As I write that, I realize how prudish it may sound, but I don’t care about Egan’s sexual conquests or in what manner she is coitally engaged (I can’t keep using the verb “fuck”, can I? It’s starting to wear out it’s welcome. In fact, in moments of frustration, it sadly no longer does the job.), but rather that her version of feminism has become widespread among my generation and younger, that a woman’s right to choose who she fucks and what she wears is the end all and be all of the feminist program. And I know how it sounds for me to write something like that, “Oh, here’s a white male to set everyone straight”, but it has less to do with my status groups and more to do with a general worry that goes beyond my particular personhood, that this version of feminism, as the public face of feminism, has gained enough traction to supplant more worthy understandings coming out of people like Judith Butler and Susan Bordo.
This has more to do with my problems with academia than anything else, that as amazing as the work of Butler is, it has no audience outside of a scholarly circle and that there’s no way for these ideas to filter down to a general audience, which means we’re left with these versions of feminism, that while legitimate - I wouldn’t want to say Egan has no right to peddle her beliefs, but I do think some damaging consequences may result from them, and as much as fiction shows men to be scared of sexually liberated women, I can’t help but think that this plays into mass male culture’s sexual fantasies, and is therefore tolerated and even reinforced and thus is fed back into the cultural system, and further gets reinforced (I’m no Catherine MacKinnon either, but I can’t help but think the more violent pornography gets, and the more widespread it becomes in culture, the more acceptable and desirable that kind of violence will be, that is, the generations raised on this will be structured to accept this kind of sex and to actually desire it, so that what seems to me as rather reprehensible will, to people younger than me, be the norm. So much worse for everyone involved, perhaps. Who knows when it comes to these things, although if it’s used in the service of oppressing women, of normalizing sexual violence, and of taking a male-generated fantasy and overlaying it on general culture, then that’s definitely a negative). As much as people leaped to Egan and Tkacik’s defense to say they’re not role models or they never purported to be and are therefore off the hook, well, that’s just not true. That’s part of what it means to be in the public eye, to take responsibility for oneself as an exemplar, and to not see that is to buy into the bullshit Cartesian version of the world as atomistic pieces - nothing you do ever affects anyone else and freedom means doing whatever you want. That’s the selfish, narcissistic version of how the world works that comes right out of capitalism and right out of the Enlightenment, and it’s just simply false. If you’re in the public eye, what you do really does matter, and to not see that is to live your life in bad faith.
2) Democracy Now! did a piece Wednesday about the Housing Crisis. While that’s not interesting in and of itself - or rather, just noting it isn’t interesting. The interview itself was great; I’m just sure there’s more interesting commentary out there than if I were to give my two cents on it. So rather than that, I want to look at how some of the things Nomi Prins said reveal the kind of dynamics that lead to crises like this. This is right at the beginning of the transcripts:
“Well, it’s a historical matter, and basically there’s been a lot of legislation that has weakened the regulation of the housing industry and the lending industry and the trading that takes place with it that Wall Street has enacted and has gotten us into this major, major credit mess.
It really goes back to the ’90s. There was an act passed in 1994 that was trying to actually help homeowners get protection from abusive lending, in other words, lending at a very, very high interest rate. And it was passed, and it was advocated by consumer advocates, and it had aspects of being a good bill. However, what it did was cap them after a certain rate, after a twelve-and-a-half percent rate, after a certain rate over treasuries, and it didn’t cap all of the abuses that could happen in between. So what it did, in fact, was create the beginning of the subprime situation, where lenders could say, “Alright, we don’t want to come under this regulation”—it’s called the HOEPA law, H-O-E-P-A, Home Owners Equity Protection Act of 1994. Lenders said, “Alright, you know what? We won’t come in there at the high rates. We don’t want to get on the radar screen in that respect. We’ll just come right under, and we’ll start to look for ways to make loans with lots of bells and whistles and lots of fees attached to them, where we can come under the radar screen and start to create this kind of market of potential problems.”
Now, we didn’t know these problems were happening in the ’90s. That was one issue. They didn’t start to happen until the market started to fall apart after the boom of the ’90s, the bust that occurred in 2001, 2002, because of a lot of corporate scandals and other measures that were happening in the world and in the US economy, in particular. And since then, we’ve had a fallout. But the seeds were placed in the ’90s.”
As I wrote in an earlier post about the food crisis, as far as my limited time searching the web goes, very few people are writing about these things as functions of different interdependent characteristics of an unimaginably complex economic system. With Prins’ assessment above though, I think (and it will take someone more adept than me to spell it out) the beginnings of a decent analysis are there. Let me take a small stab at it though. Alright, so you have some system - some economic system - and there’s this law passed that is supposed to protect homeowners, but because no one bothers to try and understand the interdependencies, what this ends up doing is creating a boundary on the system that allows for new kinds of behavior. The law creates a constraint, and the constraint conflicts with a more imposing rule about how a corporation is supposed to be run: maximize profit at any cost. There’s probably way more to this, but my knowledge of economics is so brief as to be laughable. I just wanted to point out that when you have conflicting rules like that that govern the behavior of entities, you’re going to get a chaotic regime. Uh, or something. Just as a phenomenological example, think how chaotic your mind gets when you have a number of things to do that are mutually exclusive and you don’t have a clear-cut linear order for performing these tasks. For a while you’re in a transient state as you bounce around from activity to activity, doing bits and pieces here and there, and eventually, it sorts itself out as you realize which is the highest priority and you attend to that first and so on. It’s that initial chaos as your mental system has a number of conflicting constraints: Do X, do Y and do Z all at the same time. With the mortgage crisis, it’s an analogous pattern. You tell a for-profit industry to simultaneously limit the amount of money it can accumulate and that it must, at the expense of any other concern, accumulate the most profit it can, and you’re creating the conditions for this kind of crisis.
One of the things I wonder about unrestrained capitalist is how far can the corporation go before the maximization of profit causes the products it creates to become useless. I think of things like plastic knives you get to butter your bagel which are essentially useless because they’re so flimsy. Or customer service which for most corporations is designed to give the consumer the run-around rather than help them, rendering the thing or service you’ve bought particularly useless (I’ve had numerous problems with Verizon over the years). Of all the internal contradictions of capitalism, this one seems like it might reach the breaking point first. It won’t affect the world in the same way as the destruction of the earth will (obviously) but it seems like it’s temporally closer.
3) I think I want to write a paper on starting to flesh out dynamics and aesthetics, although that idea is way too broad for a paper. Maybe on attractor space and musical structure? I was thinking of it like this, there was a codetermination between the way music was promoted and the way music was produced that led to the legitimization of certain structures for commercialized forms: 7″, LP, cassette, CD, etc. I was thinking of something like Dusted. We only review albums, albums that are put out by a label, maybe even in digital form, but still something baptized as “an album”. And that’s a constant for most music publications, so in affect an attractor space is created for the production of music, where there are a number of forms and genres and they interact in different ways to produce certain legitimized, commercialized forms. And these feed back into the system to further reinforce these certain forms. What’s interesting is that even with the opening up of this system with the inclusion of digital music, most bands still stick to some recognizable format. Anyway, this is just musing, but I really want to start trying to figure these things out in a more formal way.
The real task is to flesh out just what is useful analogically from the study of ecological dynamics and what is a dead end. Are genres niches? In what way? What is the fitness landscape for an album? How do the economic, critical (evaluative) and the hermeneutic (interpretational) constraints interact? What are the other constraints? What is the local level for a musical system and what’s the global level, or how does art as a system break down into different levels of organization with different properties “emerging” or adhering to each level? Is a “song” the primary unit, the interaction between songs in an album the lowest level of organization? What does it mean then for an artist to pick a sequence? Is meaning formed from the play between songs, the play between albums, the play between different hermeneutic regions?
These are all preliminary questions, some shoddy, some showing promise, but it’s a start at least.
Filed by andyb at July 13th, 2008 under Complexity, gripes, philosophy
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July 7, 2008
I haven’t written in here in a while because I’ve mostly been reading and digesting a lot of stuff on dynamics, reading both these books:
and though I had a lot of preliminary stuff with Chuck Dyke in grad school , this is a whole ‘nother level, especially as I try to envision exactly what this means for a study of aesthetics.
And I’ve kind of been using my writing at Dusted as a staging ground for some of these ideas, much to the chagrin of my editor, who I think is beginning to grow weary of my shenanigans. The problem I run into though is that often the music is uncomplicated enough that any moron can just click on the mp3 embedded in the top of the page and come up with an opinion for herself or just google search the name if biographical data is what the reader is seeking. Combined with my wish to not do the publicist’s job for her, this means that I have to find other things to talk about when I’m “reviewing” things that don’t warrant a whole lot of internal discussion (internal to the album). A lot of albums are like this, frankly. Few artists actually take the concept seriously, and most of the time it’s just a collection of songs in a pleasant order. Part of that’s the format and the economic constraints (give the listener the most bang for her buck), so I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not condemnable. At least in certain cases where the artists should know better. Obviously not all music is going to serve some grand aesthetic purpose, but why the rest of it needs reviewing then baffles me. Well, not really; the capitalist machinery that makes indie culture(s) no different than mainstream culture except in aesthetic constrains and shapes these structures, so it’s not that puzzling. It’s just a matter of figuring out how the different networks hook up to each other, how the ground-level activity can cause global patterns, etc.
So, I wrote this one review on Gal Costa, the edited version you can see by clicking here. As much as my ego would like to cry foul, it was definitely the smart move on the editor’s part to cut down the insane behemoth I originally wrote. However, although I only have a very basic grasp on some of these concepts, I still think there may be a lot of half-formed but interesting things in the original review which I want to post:
“Of all the things the re-issue of Gal Costa’s 1969 eponymous album opens up for discussion (the recent interest in Tropicalia or cultural flow from core producing nations to peripheral ones and the ethical or aesthetic implications), one of the most interesting is a discussion of what is gained and what is lost when this particular album re-enters the world as a commercial product. A re-release affords us a somewhat unique opportunity; as most of the music that I’m asked to review is new – the album appears on the scene primed for symbolic dissection, with no prior criticism I have to be attentive to – past interpretations or past understandings never enter into the discussion. In this case though, Gal was an already existing art object. It had some previous context, both a past-historical one and a completely different cultural one, and now it re-emerges four decades later carrying all that prior meaning with it, and in addition gaining new meanings which will interact and play off of all the old ones. The dynamics of the situation are such that the two contexts become linked by this piece of art, and the trajectory for Costa’s album that can be roughly mapped as such: whatever it meant in 1969, whatever transformations of meaning it went through in subsequent years, and whatever it means now as an album that is being once again inserted into public consciousness in a different country from its origins.
The above space is a way we can visualize all the different criteria at once. Or at least three different things because any more and we wouldn’t be able to visualize it in the first place. So, three things, and each axis is labeled, one with position (Global North, i.e., developed country or Global South, i.e., developing nation), one with time, and one with frequency (This is just a measure of how easily available the album is. If you have to scour a P2P in hopes of finding it, it’s not that frequent. If you can go down to your local record store and pick up a copy, well, you do the math.). The trajectory then that Gal takes goes from somewhere in the lower left (there used to be lots of copies in Brazil) then it wavers around the origin oscillating back and forth as copies become available every once and awhile, at least here in America. Rick Wojcik, one of the co-founders of Dusty Groove told me in an e-mail, “We’d actually sold hundreds of copies of the Brazilian CD pressing of the record over the past decade or so — but that CD was always very hard to get, somewhat expensive, and has been out of print for a few years — so our ability to reach Americans with it was somewhat limited.” I’m not privy to Brazilian sales figures, but at the very least, it was rather inaccessible to us. Anyway, the trajectory then moves into the back, top right as the album is reissued. So it appears on the scene, oscillates around the origin, then becomes frequent again in a different position. If it never went out of print in South America, we’ll have to complicate the picture a bit, but for now, let’s just keep it (relatively) simple. That’s what our trajectory looks like.
I want to keep this moderately straightforward, but I think I need to say something about what exactly I am doing here. If you think about what a piece of art means, that particular meaning is dependent on a number of different factors: historical period, culture, sub-culture and I can list factors until I die of old age, alone and in a homeless shelter. But when you pin down the meaning of that piece of art – in a review, an essay, even just talking with your friends – you’ve understood it at that one moment, in that one context. However, there are (depending on that piece of art) hundreds or thousands or more people doing the same thing as you are, and all those people are interacting, maybe in real life, maybe online, and so all those different meanings start interacting with each other to create even more meanings. Then time passes, and previous meanings start to interact with new meanings from another generation of people. Maybe it’s been so long that a certain meaning becomes canonical (interpretations of Shakespeare or Plato). There are millions of scenarios; the point though is to see that the creation of meaning is a dynamic process that oscillates and roils and goes through fallow periods and then periods of large-scale change depending on the art object, and beyond that process being dynamic, it’s also a non-linear one, that is, meanings interact on a number of different interconnected levels that may very well contradict each other.
So, when I discuss these basic features of Gal, features like time, position, and frequency, this is just the very beginning of a much larger analysis. I’m saying, in effect, “There’s too many things to keep track of, especially in what is supposed to be a somewhat short review, so let’s look at the most basic criteria: how many, at what time and where, and see if any meaning can be shaken out of these simple things.” The question then is: does the trajectory carve out an arbitrary path (i.e., is there any significance to linking the two contexts)? If we want to discuss the way meaning transforms, or the path(s) meaning takes from its original release to its present re-release, what is it, if anything, that links the two symbolic arenas? And probably, since this is a piece of art, most people’s initial responses would be to examine the aesthetic connections: what is it about each context artistically such that it actually makes sense to link Brazil in 1969 and the US in 2008? In this case though, I think that might actually be a red herring. The re-emergence of Tropicalia isn’t that mysterious, owing to a good mixture of reissuing, publicity, and endorsement, and aesthetically, I wonder if that meaning has really changed all that dramatically. There are all the intervening people influenced by Os Mutantes or Caetano Veloso, and certainly the social context is different, but other than that, there haven’t been any major evolutionary shifts in pop music in the last half-century. Uncountable micro-changes, sure, but people are still producing music like Costa’s today, so that there is a discontinuous, symbolic shift that so changes the meaning, of that I am skeptical.
The aesthetic connections then, or the connections that occur at the crossroads between the aesthetic dimension (the high-quality, the beauty, the uniqueness of the album) and a measure of frequency, strike me as rather easy to quantify. If an album of sufficient excellence (and Gal (1969) is a fantastic album – Costa achieves this immanent, emotional quality with her voice – a meaningfulness – that I’m hard-pressed to find many analogues to that don’t simply feel manufactured) dips below a certain frequency, it will be re-released. This isn’t to create some law-like universal rule, but rather to simply identify a pattern. If there’s no greater meaning to Gal once again being available than the fact that it’s well regarded and rare, then it is up to us to say something more, and therefore, I think the political connection between the two contexts is worth examining. This is not to lose sight though of the aesthetic concerns but rather to add another dimension to our examination.
When I first sat down to write, what really struck me as rather poetic was the political similarities between the two contexts – the global political tumult in the wake of 1968 and the current crises (global food shortages, major environmental disasters, the war in Iraq, the housing crisis here with its financial repercussions abroad, etc.) that are affecting the political landscape (although sans the concerted and overwhelming resistance of 1968). The current crises aren’t simply disconnected though; they are symptoms or features of the entire world-system of capitalism in crisis, and the current batch of problems had its origins in 1968. As Irving Wallerstein notes, “One plausible moment at which to start the story of this contemporary systemic crisis is the world revolution of 1968, which unsettled the structures of the world-system considerably. This world revolution marked the end of a long period of liberal supremacy, thereby dislocating the geoculture that had kept the political institutions of the world-system intact. And dislocating this geoculture unhinged the underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy and exposed it to the full force of political and cultural shocks to which it had always been subject, but from which it had previously been somewhat sheltered” (World-Systems Analysis, 77). What connects these two contexts then is that the revolution which gave birth to art like Gal is coming to fruition currently (although who knows how long “fruition” actually accounts for).
Recently, Democracy Now! has been running a series of features under the rubric “1968, Forty Years Later”, dealing with a number of topics such as the May uprising in France, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, the Columbia student strike and so on, the questions behind these reports being something like the ones I am asking of Costa’s album: what did these things mean then, what have the repercussions been and what do they mean now. Listening to the features, one of the interesting things that results from them is that while there have been many positive changes that resulted from the student and worker’s strike or the civil rights movement, etc., the mythic quality attributed to these events appears overblown, and their long-lasting positive impact has been minimal, at least in relation to say, the long-lasting negative impact of global capitalism. As 2008 reaches its mid-point, while there are many bright spots in terms of world-wide resistance to capitalism, to tyranny and so forth, the coherency and connectedness that existed in 1968, though it should be much easier to attain thanks to technology (the internet as a tool for organizing, for example), is ephemeral at best.
Tariq Ali, in his interview with Juan Gonzalez, explains, “So the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003 were gigantic, much larger than anything that happened in the ’60s, both the United States and in Europe. Gigantic. But it was a spasm. It happened, and then it disappeared. And it was as if millions of ordinary citizens were coming out to tell their politicians, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying. Don’t force us into this war.” But once the war happened and Iraq was occupied, through demoralization, depression, a sense of powerlessness, they retreated. Whereas in ’68 the movement grew slowly and built up to a peak, here the movement peaked to try and stop a war, and then it disappeared.”
What’s interesting then about the re-emergence of Gal is that it re-appears on the scene merely as an artifact of a bygone era. Where it once had real political significance, it, like a number of the Democracy Now! subjects, has lost that meaning, or rather, not lost it per se, but had it covered over, buried under the intervening years. Part of the immediacy of Costa’s voice that I noted above, both in contrast to her later work and the previous self-titled album, comes directly out of the politics of the age and place: five years prior to the recording of the album, a military coup overthrew the government. In the wake of the insurrection, politicians, labor leaders, artists and regular citizens faced brutal repression, torture, and execution. This intensified in 1968 when the “president” General Costa e Silva introduced Institutional Act 5, effectively creating a dictatorship. This continued into the following year bringing with it opposition in the form of a host of revolutionary acts until Silva’s death. The context that Gal was created within, and the political and artistic repression that specifically affected members of the Tropicalia movement (see this interview with Sergio Dias for more information) imbue the album, at that originary time with a meaning that just isn’t accessible to us today but that still resides dormant in the music. In other words, the album is that period rendered concrete, but without that political context, it comes across now as merely a pop album, an amazing pop album of course, one that can be appreciated for any number of its aesthetic qualities, but still lacking a central importance: the facet of resistance.
While the Tropicalia’s movement’s politics might have been left-leaning but as inchoate as some of their influences (ahem, The Beatles), it’s her voice that truly embodies the resistance of the age. I hold out hope that that immediacy in Costa’s voice and in the music, a quality that we can still viscerally recognize, can bring it’s former meaning to the fore and in addition can further inspire both artistically and politically positive action. I suppose my own overwhelming pessimism forces me to believe it will not, but even so, the aesthetic qualities are more than enough to draw upon. Unfortunately, as an American audience, all we can (without knowledge of Portuguese, that is) draw upon is that immediacy, as the political content of the lyrics is lost as is the phenomenological feeling of resistance that it originally brought out in the listener.”
Right. So, you can see why maybe that was whittled down. Regardless though, I think starting to see art in this way is going to be overall a really important thing. Not perhaps the way I did it above; but there’s still some interesting things to talk about. For example, I don’t think I really accurately described the trajectory well enough because it’s not going to be a linear path, but rather, at some point, it will be available within both the global south and the global north, and therefore the trajectory bifurcates, moving according to the other parameters as time goes on and frequency waxes and wanes in each geographical region. In addition, geography itself hides a number of dimensions within that parameter, as one breaks it down by region, and frequency should properly break down into a measure of population x availability (That is, what if there’s a lot of CDs, but they’re stuck in a warehouse somewhere. Then they’re not frequent. Or if there’s one copy that everyone in the world shares, it’s the same thing).
Now this system might not be anything special to look at but I think the non-linear play of meaning that results from the bifurcation could in principle be an early version of what I am imagining a full study of dynamic aesthetics would entail. Levins and Lewontin in the above book discuss genotypic and phenotypic plasticity in terms of interactions between the genome and the environment (my jargon might be a bit off). So, this one graph measures the viability of certain genotypes of drosophila against temperature ranging from 16.5 to 25 degrees Celcius. There are a few that are uniformly poor, no matter the temperature, such that it’s always the case that less than 15% survive. For the other genotypes though, there’s no linear relationship between viability and temperature. One genotype might fare well at 16.5 degrees and 90% survive, whereas at 25.5 degrees, the same genotype, only 30% survive. What it does in-between though isn’t to move steadily down frmo 90%, but could go all over. At the same time, there are other genotypes that at 16.5 have a 90% viability and hover at that point even raised to 25.5 degrees. In other words, there’ s no clear cut linear relationship between the two parameters, and when we move to the realm of hermeneutics, I think meaning is going to have analogous patterns.
Some pieces of art will definitely be linear, there not being a lot there or being so universal (at least for certain populations). But others will exist as a function of the interactions between different populations of meanings, as unresolved contradictions, i.e., hermeneutic bifurcations. I’m sure the philosophical literature on this is large, Derrida most likely, although I’ve only barely scratched the surface. I’m sure this is all already either fleshed out somewhere or will undergo many transformations before being something viable in and of itself. Regardless, the point is to begin to see pieces of art not as static things at some here and now but as developing through time, both physically and hermeneutically, and not to see these things as some essentialized present with an easily sussed out origin (Derrida’s understanding of logocentrism and the understanding in complexity theory that you can’t simply wind back the clock to figure out the origin since all complex adaptive systems are dependent on contingencies perhaps have much in common).
Filed by andyb at July 7th, 2008 under Complexity, philosophy
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April 27, 2008
Each of these topics on it’s own seems like waste to post about since I’ve only got a little to add to each, and with the latter, writing anything at all seems to be the useless act of a little Nero (I suppose we’re all little Neros at this point anyway. In any event, if that is so, at least perhaps I can try to produce an interesting tune before it all burns down around us. Or maybe we could all put down the fucking fiddles and actual do something for once.).
I was hanging out with my friend Nik yesterday who is writing his dissertation on Bourdieu, and one of the things he told me was how pessimistic Bourdieu was because everywhere he looked he saw all these determinacies fashioning people into constructed identities. One of the things I’ve been trying to do this semester with my students however is to see how identity as a complex adaptive system of beliefs/practices can be the fundament for novel behavior even with all these determinacies.
Right, so what does that mean. While Bourdieu is mostly right - at least on Nik’s telling since I can’t really start delving into this stuff until the semester ends - that is, most people rarely deviate from their entrainments, or if they do, it has to result from a series of contingent events that perturbed their identity-system enough that they were entrained to a new habitus. For example, you don’t just go from believing in god, from having faith, to being an atheist overnight. And even though people often have these epiphanic moments where everything just makes sense, I’m willing to bet that in most cases it’s an ex post facto narrative device that they construct to tell people how they came to be a non-believer (same thing for any change from an originary determinacy, not just a religious change). Even if, say, the epiphanic moment was a real, genuine point of clarity, I want to think that it was still a slow process of emerging in which that final moment was but the tipping point, a trajectorial phase change, if you will.
Depending on the strength of our originary entrainments or determinacies, that is, how well indoctrinated you are by your parents and early peer groups, authority that you encounter early on in life and so on, and depending on your biology and how that fits in (I haven’t done any research so take this with a grain of salt, but I find it hard to believe that our biology doesn’t play a large part in the evolution of our selves, on a macro scale of course dealing with race, height, weight, sex, etc. but also on a cognitive level in terms of brain shape, development, intelligence, memory, etc.), this sets your identity up as either a strong or a weak or somewhere in between system, a system that can either accept a number of perturbations or one that is continually in crisis based on contingent events or even one that is so dogmatic that contingencies don’t matter. There’s a whole range of course, and this is only one small facet of how our identities work, but the point is, individual trajectories of individual people, depending on that early development, can only take so many hits before being “knocked off course” so to speak.
Besides the fact that different identity-systems can change based on different contingencies, there is also an endogenous ability for our identities to generate novelty. If one is inculcated with conflicting beliefs or is part of a number of different status groups with conflicting ideologies, that conflict itself could cause the identity-system to bifurcate allowing for new beliefs and new practices to emerge from the chaos. Add on to all of this a Sartean level of self-choice, that is, even though we’re not as free as Sartre wants us to be, we’re not as determined as Bourdieu may want us to be either, rather we’re systems with rhythms based on the kind of attractor our personalities follow, so add on a level of self-awareness in which conscious choices we make can feedback into our identity systems, and there are a number of ways genuine novelty can be generated.
To switch gears then, with the food crisis deepening, I’ve been looking for someone - anyone - in the mainstream press or otherwise, who is looking at what is going on from the view of complex systems. Mostly, people are willing to give a causal argument - biofuel production or increased meat consumption in China and India, but until the following, I had not seen anyone espouse a world-systems analysis of the crisis. While Basu doesn’t use the language of complexity or of someone like Wallerstein, the critique is there implicitly, and I think it gives some real depth and perhaps could be a good model for policy discussion, that is, if people actually want to stop food prices from getting completely out of hand and not have a large portion of the world’s population starve to death. But what do I know? I’m not a rich piece of shit.
Filed by andyb at April 27th, 2008 under Complexity, philosophy
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April 7, 2008
This is just a quick something. I am between classes and sitting in the adjunct lounge goofing off online, where I ran into the following:
You can see fuller descriptions of this whole project here at Gawker and at NotCot. The basic explanation is that the artist, Stefanie Pasavec, is creating a literary map of Kerouac’s On the Road, a book I could not care less about, but that’s not what’s interesting about the project. I’m actually surprised no one brought this up yet, and a google search of the artist’s name and “fractal” nets nothing, but that very obviously has fractal properties, and as NotCot says, “The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.”
This is interesting in terms of the manipulation of a certain state space, and that when manipulated in a certain way, the regularities and patterns become apparent. In other words, certain ways of analyzing books will not evince the literary patterns in the book, but if one stretches the space in a certain way, those patterns emerge.
This site, Flowing Data, might hold some interest as well.
Filed by andyb at April 7th, 2008 under Complexity
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March 7, 2008
I only subscribe to one magazine, The Believer. The cost is modest, and there’s usually at least a few worthwhile bits in each issue, although the whole thing kind of stinks of the mainstream intelligensia habitus that I found so distasteful in academia. Nevertheless, I myself am entrained in a large part to that habitus, so there’s enough there for me. Anyway, I’m backed up about a year. If you ask why, here’s is what I am reading currently:
Tom Rockmore - Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Steve Aylett - Only an Alligator
William Cronon, ed. - Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
Simone de Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity
Jeffrey St. Clair - Been Brown So Long It Looked Green to Me
Immanuel Wallerstein - World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
So, I get through these…quite…slowly. I sat down though to check out the April 2007 issue a few minutes ago though and immediately felt the need to write something, to write about something that’s been bothering me a lot lately. I was reading the first article, Jonathan Taylor’s “Admiration Journey”, ostensibly about going to Thomas Bernhard’s house in Austria to, I don’t know, connect with the writer, or in my mind - I didn’t get past the first page of the article because I wanted to go write this, and what I have to say isn’t really in relation of Taylor’s article anyway, so I don’t feel bad about bolting off without hearing the guy through (I have no idea if his point will coincide, conflict or have nothing to do with mine) - or in my mind, somehow see the material existence of the writer and try to find some explanation for Bernhard’s writings in it.
The Believer featured an article a while back about visiting writers’ houses, how they’ve turned into museums and things like that and what people expect to gain, etc. I don’t remember the point of the article, and I have too much stuff to do to go back and re-read it just to note it in a blog, but my memory wants me to believe that it was somewhat antithetical to the whole idea. Let me try something else though, but keep in mind: writer’s houses, writer’s things, viz., material existence.
A few months ago, I finished one of the Penguin collections of Lovecraft’s stories:
A thoroughly footnoted-to- death volume in which every facet of every story is somehow connected with Lovecraft’s life. If a restaurant is mentioned, a Lovecraft scholar figures out where Lovecraft was eating when he was writing that story and then tracks down the menu and figures out the likely meal that ol’ H.P. ate that gave birth to the idea for Yuggoths or Sluggoths or Digdug or whatever. Because writers and artists never just make anything up. There is always something in reality that is causally related to everything an artist creates.
Let’s put aside for a moment the kinds of shitty biopics like Pollock which show the actual causal connections between, I don’t know, accidentally knocking a paint can over with dripping paint on a canvas. Rather I want to concentrate on the idea that seems to be pervasive, not only that our thoughts or the ideas we invent are causally and linearly connected to material existence (not that there isn’t a connection), but that you can draw a narrative out of it that you can connect event A with thought B, not necessarily in a nomothetic way, but at least within a plausible explanatory framework.
I had my critical thinking students watch Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and when it was over, I asked, “Why did Frank masturbate and wipe his semen all over the place at school?” The answers were all good, but all causal: his parent’s divorce, he has an Oedipal complex, the kid’s a freak, etc., i.e., there is some event or some thing we can point to that counterfactually, if it hadn’t have occurred, would not have caused Frank’s abnormal behavior.
Perhaps there is something to the counterfactual, but in a different way than the causal picture paints. I would contend that yes, indeed, we can locate the divorce in a background of concerns that, if they never occurred, Frank wouldn’t have behaved in such a way (maybe…that’s the problem with counterfactuals, they’re ‘what if’ games, and in dynamic evolutionary systems, you can’t wind back the clock and expect to get the same behavior). But it’s not the divorce that caused him to masturbate in public (think of the ridiculousness of that statement), but rather that the divorce tore asunder a system of relations, throwing that system (his family) into a period of crisis, a period directed by a chaotic attractor, whereby the members of the system had no clear entrainments to follow and thereby flitted about with no clear goal in mind.
In other words, Frank’s behavior is an emergent property, or if emergence isn’t to your taste, it was a new property of the system guided by these new relations (the divorce breaking apart the former ones and creating this new one: joint custody), and the older system isn’t causally related to the new one, but is simply a prior state of the new one which is sublated (aufheben) within the new configuration. That is, the new configuration is a transformed version of the old one, where parts of the system are preserved and parts are negated, and if I really wanted to get Hegelian (even though I only barely understand the process), I could try to explain the contradictions of the family prior to the divorce, etc.
Ok, let me get back to the beginning. The picture we have of artists is almost universally a causal one. Things happen in the artist’s life and the artists uses them as fodder for her fiction or painting or etc. And thus realism is our paradigm. I won’t get into the folly of realism as somehow giving an objective view of whatever (There’s actually quite a good article in The Believer by Chris Bachelder entitled “Doctorow’s Brain” on the subject [Feb 07]), but there’s a correspondence theory of fiction going on here, a one-to-one correspondence between the events in an artist’s life and her art.
I want to contend though that even when a person plunders her life in order to create, this isn’t an easy causal connection, but rather a way of linearizing the process afterwards in order to tell a story about the creation of the work. In fact, when we try to reduce a piece of fiction or any artwork to the material existence of the artist - to think her house or his writing desk will explain the artwork or the process of creating - we’re playing in to the Enlightenment explanatory framework of atomism and additivity. Break the system down into its constituent parts, explain each part, and rebuild the system. Presto: there’s why Gravity’s Rainbow exists because Thomas Pynchon, I don’t know, whatever, likes eating prunes. But dynamic systems are non-additive. You can’t just put the members of the family above together and: there you go. What makes the family, The Berkmans, are the relationships between the characters, both exogenous and endogenous to the family unit, and the transformations of that system.
Creativity is not a causal relationship, but an emergent one of a certain system. You can’t learn about an artist’s life and expect to get clues about how such-and-such an event led directly to the creation of an artwork. You can try to re-build her life into a just-so story if you need to, and certainly, a person’s life isn’t immaterial to the subject at hand, but that life in isolation of anything else is just going to lead you astray, and even located within a dense network of interconnections can’t give you a perfect story.
The question then is to try and figure out properties of systems that seem to foster interesting creative works, not, again, in a manner that is supposed to draw out a lawlike regularity, but rather that may give one more insight into some probabilities for certain systems (so, of course, the boundary conditions have to be rather explicit).
Filed by andyb at March 7th, 2008 under philosophy
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I saw a leak of the last episode of The Wire last night and then just sat around devastated for a while. I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but one thing I’ve thought about is how expertly the realism draws you in so that you kind of overlook the literary quality of the show, which is immense. Not only the fact that the fifth season played as a farce, but just in the way characters echoed other characters lines, how themes repeated themselves - leitmotifs that worked their way in and out of the story, how the end draws everything together in a way I’ve seen almost no TV shows do and very few movies. After The Wire, I don’t think there’s anyone who can denigrate the medium of television again (Jupiter’s Thunder!).
Anyway, I just wanted to post
Is ‘The Wire’ Our Best Ethnographic Text on the U.S. Today?
My friend Brian sent me this link, and it relates to something I wrote two posts ago, where I said The Wire is more affecting as a piece of philosophy than all Anglo/American philosophy and certainly a lot of whatever else is around. The person in the post above asks what might a class on the show look like, what texts might one read? If I was going to do one that dealt with the philosophical angle, there’d be Bourdieu, Wallerstein, Marx maybe, Chuck Dyke - especially the essay he wrote on identity with his son and his Foucault piece “Extralogical Excavations”, Alan Garfinkel’s Forms of Explanation, Foucault, Nietzsche perhaps…I kind of wish I was still at Temple and could apply for this one fellowship where you get to design your own interdisciplinary class…
Also, just to pass this idea along, David Simon and the other writers penned this short piece about civil disobedience and the drug war and what realistically we as citizens can begin to do:
Click here
It’s pretty smart and maybe The Wire will be instrumental in opening up a dialogue about this. Or, well, maybe I can hope it will, against all empirical evidence that most people don’t give a shit about anything but their own narrow interests. J/k, maybe.
Filed by andyb at March 7th, 2008 under Uncategorized
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March 6, 2008
I’ve been meaning to write for months, but as usual teaching has gotten in the way. So, while most of the stuff I’ve been having my students read has been fertile ground to expound upon here, it’s also been impossible to have more than a few spare moments in which to arrange the disparate threads, an embarrassment of riches really, too much stuff for my brain to make sense of, although like a weird homing beacon or a kind of rhythmic Dionysian pounding in the background Hegel of all people has been the unifying factor ranging across four classes (two critical thinking, an environmental philosophy, a feminist philosophy), either in analyzing how meaning changes, how categories work, dialectical stages, contradictions, negations of negations, and I suppose the complexity of all this, of an entire system for understanding the non-linear dynamics of semiotic systems, is probably too much for one little post. And fuck if I have more than a glimmer of Hegel’s system or of how complexity theory can account for systems of meaning. Glimmers.
The…buzzwords?…I hate the phrase. The keywords. Keywords is better. The keywords: non-causality, amplification, positive and negative feedback, attractors, attractor space or basins of attraction, state or phase space, non-additivity, entrainment, the fractal edge.
Systems of meaning can be limned within these keywords. Begun to be sketched. I wonder if I feed into the inherent narcissism of my students by trying to explain their own identities as microcosms of this. Am I a Dr. Melfi figure just giving them the tools of self-justification? Forget the argument from nature, this is the argument from structure. Thankfully we have yet to get to ethics. Responsibility. “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.” Sartre. Kind of a dick.
I am reading Beauvoir at the moment. Steeped in Hegel. Dripping with it. The reciprocity of subjectivity. Freedom. The big topics. Actually, I like Sartre, but he’s got nothing on his wife. Well, kind of like him. Most of “Existentialism as a Humanism” is rather douchey.
The question is, if systems are non-causal in a traditional sense, if different scales or different organizational schemes carry with them different properties, emergent if you wish, what are the dynamics of the system? What are the dynamics of identity? Beauvoir says,”The child does not contain the man he will become” (40). Ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate shit. The lie of the modern psychological novel is that our behavior is causal, that our childhoods cause us to be the people we are today. But it’s all dialectics. We’re just microcosms of the worldspirit. We’re negations of negations, parts of our childhood jutting out like unearthed rock outcropping.
Who’s written on this besides Chuck Dyke?
Filed by andyb at March 6th, 2008 under philosophy
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January 14, 2008
I haven’t written here in a while, mostly due to the fact that I’ve had nothing to say. At the end of last semester, I had some thoughts about what direction philosophy could go in, some things culled from what I was teaching in a critical thinking course at a local college here in Philly, but I sat down to write, didn’t, and never returned to the subject.
I suppose the fact is, I don’t give a shit what direction philosophy goes in, if it even goes in any direction at all. I assume the whole discipline is going to go the way of American Jews at some point - eventually the non-devout will be assimilated into other disciplines, as has been going on since the McCarthyite purge of academia in the 50s (see John McCumber’s brilliant Time in a Ditch, which I never pass up the chance to recommend - mostly because that book helped signal the beginning of the end of my life in professional philosophy), leaving a core orthodoxy that will eventually dwindle or become a pure historical discipline or something of that nature. How does one justify their budget to the increasingly business-like modern university? Oh, right, we teach logic to students because it’s a workable model of how rational arguments progress…er, well, that is…it might be a way to judge truth and falsity, that is, if we ignore people like Gödel and Tarski and pretend that natural languages are closed systems or that grammar isn’t historically variable (so fuck you, Foucault [which I’m sure many of the people I’m unfairly maligning would say to him if he wasn’t dead and they had actually read something he wrote]), and yes, I’m being quite unfair to those I methodologically disagree with, but it’s tough to hold my contempt in sometimes, and now that I don’t have to play the academic political game, what harm comes with telling these people that they are intellectually bankrupt? And who in academia would give a fuck what criticisms I’d have of them anyway?
Oh, what a scathing indictment! A man in a blog said some untoward things about something he doesn’t like! Well that’s going to set the world on fire.
The fact of the matter though is that I’m simply just disappointed by philosophy’s (as a discipline) inability to actually be in a position to affect anyone. For various historical reasons that have amplified over time and been fed back into the system, philosophy is the realm of the privileged scholar, and it’s a realm that has become so dissociated from the world it attempts to explain that it never even comes close. Much like for neo-classical economic theory to make any sense, it has to idealize ad absurdum, analytic - and to an extent the continental orthodoxy as well - philosophy idealizes to the point where humans are no longer recognizably human, if they even appear in the discussion at all. I contend that this is why philosophy since modern times has been awash in sci-fi examples and situations.
Alright, so why bother with another polemic - it’s not like this blog is lacking for them, is it? (I had to end the sentence with “is it” so I could include the question mark that needs to be there to have the first part of the sentence make sense. I suppose if I didn’t use hyphens to signal asides, which I think is grammatically incorrect anyway, I wouldn’t have to resort to the rhetorical question.).
Tonight, I was reading this great article on The Wire, and I started to think about why this show is so amazing: how it shows how complex interactions within certain social structures can lead to chaotic or unpredictable regimes, how it shows how power structures and epistemological structures are linked, how it shows how certain practices can feedback into the system and amplify over time, and most importantly, what happens to the human beings that have to live in and with these systems, how difficult - if not impossible - they are to overthrow, and most importantly, how you can cope in the face of such monumental and ungraspable entanglements.
A few quotes from Simon:
“Thematically, it’s about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism.” (from his Slate interview).
And from a New Yorker article:
““The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less”.”
My point being what? Well, the thing is, The Wire so eloquently and tragically says all the things that philosophy should be saying. That is, philosophy does say all these things - or rather, there are philosophers or people writing philosophy that say these things, a few of them with the force and wit of the show, but none of these people are in a position where anyone outside of academia will read them. Some of these people are bothered by that and some of these people actively distance themselves from the philosophical orthodoxy and some of these people work to connect the things they write to the outside world where it can make a difference. And furthermore, I know that very little theoretical writing has the viscereality that fiction can give. Think of this less as a criticism of philosophy and more as a lament for the direction it has gone, where the good philosophers (and no this is not a Threnody for the Victims of Academia, but rather one bemoaning the fate of those within the system) are the McNultys and Bunks of the academic world, trying to actually say something vital and worthwhile when the economic constraints and the constraints of academic tradition make it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.
Filed by andyb at January 14th, 2008 under gripes, philosophy
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November 7, 2007
Over the weekend, I played Bioshock at my friend’s house for the first (only?) time. It was pretty fun and creepy, and the plot is that an experimental city which was the outgrowth of a Randian philosophy turns (surprise) into a dystopian nightmare.I was thinking about it as I was walking to the subway today and I started to think about the guy that wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and why these people have such large followings when their ideas are just rehashed bits of pseudo-philosophy with no larger significance in the history of ideas, and well, right there is the appeal. Basically, if you want to talk and write about the world philosophically, one is required - as long as one is being intellectually honest - to delve into the history of philosophy and join in the conversation. What typically makes my students’ papers bad is when they write at length about their own opinions without ever connecting those opinions to anyone else. Let’s be frank, who gives a shit what a nineteen-year-old thinks about the world dissociated from any other opinion? What is interesting is seeing that viewpoint play off against other viewpoints (i.e., a nineteen-year-old’s philosophical understanding of the world isn’t a priori uninteresting, just uninteresting if it never breaks out of a self-centeredness). So, what makes people like Rand popular is that reading her, you get easy answers and you get an entire worldview boiled down into some horrendously written books. In other words, people like Rand instantaneously appear on the scene, and to understand them requires little to no work on the reader’s part. Not simply that their ideas are naive and silly, but moreso than that, that one doesn’t have to do any intellectual archaeology in order to understand what someone like Rand is talking about. Whereas, to understand Foucault, you need to understand Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and Kant and Plato and etc. (or at least be familiar with them). Which is also why pop-philosophy is ultimately shallow and unrewarding. What makes someone like Heidegger interesting isn’t merely his ideas, but also the journey one has to go through to understand those ideas.
Anyway, to switch gears, a friend posted this Zizek piece on a messageboard I post on today, and I thought it was fairly interesting, although somewhat seemed to miss the point about a lot of struggle on the left and a lot of the different strategies, or in fact, was rather dismissive of these different tactics without any fair evaluation. Since it was a book review, I’d imagine there are space constraints, and in addition, I’m not so super-familiar with Zizek enough to know what his usual writing is like; I’ve only read a few essays of his online. They’ve always struck me as rather dissociated from life despite the fact that he’s very much into referencing pop culture. But anyway, he might have been so dismissive simply because he didn’t have the room to be anything but.
Regardless, my problem with what he’s written lies not so much with his methodology, but rather with his unreflective acceptance of using the machinery of the state to force change in a top-down fashion, which he seems to endorse in his lauding of Chavez. It’s perhaps my own unfamiliarity with the specifics of Venezuelean politics, but I’m not sure how what Chavez is doing is creating “a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics”. Of course, I favor more Bourdieuian approaches to understanding social systems, so it could just be that I can’t see the moves Zizek is making, but what’s more apparent than that is that every single one of the tactics he lists, including Chavez’s, are problematic simply because the dominant economic system is capitalism, and even creating new spaces within which to work and new ways of governing outlier parts of the periphery of the system don’t address the overall concerns. Again though, utilizing all these strategies at once perhaps has the ability to affect change in that it has the ability to push the entire system across some threshold of stability (e.g., if Venezuela becomes internally stable, it could always be an exemplar or it could even effect the periphery in a way that the core of the system becomes destabalized, especially if the core is also being destabalized by internal pockets of dissension and internal pockets which exhibit new ways of existing).
In one sense, Zizek is right in that to actually affect change, one has to be in a position of power or one has to place oneself in a position where the powerful are affected, but all of that is meaningless if it doesn’t affect and create new and different practices that can be implemented successfully in everyday life; a strategy he derides here:
“Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).”
I’m not sure why one would laud a unitary strategy anyway. Aren’t all the methodologies he lists, including Chavez’s, useful in the global struggle against capitalism? Some perhaps more than others, but still?
Filed by andyb at November 7th, 2007 under philosophy
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November 6, 2007
I haven’t written here in a few weeks because I’ve been busy with other projects and my weekends have been taken up with various things – last week was my ten-year high school reunion and this week I was visiting my sister in Pittsburgh for her birthday – but these trips, steeped as they were with nostalgia, inundated with it, it reminded me of the introduction I wrote to a paper on complexity and disturbative art (Danto’s academic speak for pranks and other kinds of subversive art – although since he does mostly analytic aesthetics, his understanding of it is drained of the political so he never actually begins to understand the significance of these aesthetic strategies…read it for yourself. Here’s the citation: Arthur C. Danto. “Art and Disturbation” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). It’s been a while since I read it, but halfway through it becomes an essay on Nietzsche that I’m inclined to say is probably not good, both because of my prejudice against analytic philosophers trying to understand anything outside of the narrow system they’ve created for themselves and also because I’ve been re-reading On the Genealogy of Morals and Kaufmann kind of mocks Danto in one of the footnotes [in the first essay, I think, if you want to check it out].)
Anyway, last year, I was teaching Foucault’s The Order of Things in a class called Science in Context. The point of using the text was to give some philosophically oriented case studies to go along with the Kuhn, to really reinforce the idea of Aufhebung in science vis-à-vis truth, which Foucault demonstrably does in that book. There were good and bad things about using that text. Bad because it’s difficult for me to read and I’m trained to understand that kind of stuff, so it must have been sheer hellish miasma for my students, but it was good because it is really challenging and also because Foucault is so thorough with his research. I doubt very many of them read it anyway, so maybe there was no problem. These things are difficult to suss out. Use a lackluster text that everyone can understand easily or use a difficult text that few will get at all. My pedagogical strategy, which is still very much in the formulative stages, is to go with the latter because I think the journey of figuring these things out is much more important than getting to some immediate destination by the end of the semester.
Anyway, the first chapter of the Foucault text is a long essay on Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas. Seemingly dissociated from the text, Foucault uses the discussion of the painting to develop the themes that are omnipresent in the rest of the book. When I first read this, and this is a bit embarrassing, but I almost cried. Here, Foucault, in this academic text was being literary and writing interesting things – and although on the whole he’s a very dry writer (and perhaps that’s just because I’m reading English translations, so who knows) – and it broke my heart because of the hole I was being forced into. My chief complaint about academic philosophy, and this isn’t in every case but many of them, was that there’s no room to develop different writing styles and the time that you spend learning the singular academic style could be spent on cultivating your own style. I’m not talking about writing experimental prose, but rather that you pay attention to the rhetorical and pedagogical aspects of what you’re doing, rather than just simply spill words out on a page in as concise and sober a manner as possible. I mean, everyone in the analytic school simply boils the history of philosophy down to a series of propositions, but we’re in a tradition that includes the dialogues of Plato, the meditations of Descartes and the polemics of Nietzsche. Ignoring this because it doesn’t fit your intellectual worldview is ridiculously intellectually dishonest. But I have been digressing.
This first chapter broke my heart because a paper I had written the year earlier, I had been criticized for doing the exact same thing, using the introduction to set up the themes without directly speaking on the subject at hand. Mind you, I was, and still am, a novice when it comes to writing academic philosophy, and I don’t just mean writing in that sober style, but writing in my own voice and with my own idiosyncratic rhetorical devices, and part of me wants to find a department that would actually allow me the leisure to develop that style and part of me wonders if I can even do that in a university setting and part of me wonders if it’s just bad anyway regardless of the context. But the last two weeks’ fulsome expanse of nostalgia reminded me of this and of the introduction I wrote, which I’ll include here:
Nostalgia; three themes: dissonance, complexity and disturbance. The world created by nostalgia is almost assuredly in every case a past situated within the hazy half-light between having existed and having never existed. Drained of the quotidian, with the phenomenal feel of the heartache siphoned off, all that is left is a residue of our experience. Such is the nature of nostalgia though. We all recognize that the affinity we feel for the past is doctored, falsified in parts, but nevertheless we accept it; there is no tension because we know a nostalgic past exists only within us and therefore cannot be held against the world as a true object for comparison. Hence the melancholy; a nostalgic yesterday is only a past for the person that holds it, and therefore history is no longer a shared experience. Each of us is alone within our individual pasts.
There is a curious feeling created by some fiction though that is analogue to this; it evokes a feeling of melancholic longing for a past that never was at all , not simply one that fluctuates between existence and non-. This is false nostalgia; it is like nostalgia proper yet carries with it a hint of disconcertedness, of vertigo. There is Ben Katchor’s comic Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. The art is decidedly anachronistic. It recalls a New York that once existed, the New York of Allen’s Radio Days or the America Ben Flesh inhabits in Elkin’s The Franchiser. Hard lines and rough shading, blocks of small businesses, cheap, rumpled suits, the immigrant experience dissolving into American culture – these things evoke the feeling of what New York once was, yet the text, the subject matter, creates a surreal experience. This is from an installment entitled “Purkinje Island”. “Safely isolated from the populous streets of midtown by the rushing of a river, yet visible from the shoulders of a tall man, stand the assorted ruins of Purkinje Island: the crumbling benches and mud-filled pools of the first American Tapeworm Sanctuary, the overgrown and neglected Manikin Burial Ground, the abandoned municipal saliva storage tanks, the ruins of an asylum for pretzel addicts and the base of a fallen monument to the physiologist who identified those tiny reflections of table lamps and intimate friends which appear on the surface of an eye.” It is at once a New York that existed and a New York that has never existed. What Katchor’s comic evokes does not waver between the two positions, but occupies them both at the same time. The most dissonance is created when two strings are tuned a beat apart, and in this way, the most dissonance can be created by art when a depiction of reality and reality are out of sync by only a frame.
Nostalgia works in part by simplifying the past, wringing out all the complexity, and reducing it to one rosy-colored dimension. These are the basic understandings we assign to arbitrary divisions in the past. In a base ten culture, decades become units to be characterized under a single heading. There is a conception of the 1960s and 70s as a tumultuous period. The same characterization might simply hold for the rest of the 20th century, for the entire 20th century or for all of human history for that matter, but the bromide of those times is that of social unrest. This characterization, coupled with the movement since Duchamp’s era away from a necessary understanding of art illuminated by the traditional aesthetic categories, provides us with facile social and aesthetic reasons for why the art of disturbation – the art that disrupts the status quo – appears on the American scene at this point. However, what of the philosophical dimension?
Katchor, Ben, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 11.
Filed by andyb at November 6th, 2007 under philosophy
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