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June 24, 2009
“Postmodern philosophy” isn’t a genre term any more than “experimental music” is. Both are wide signifiers that include any number of strategies under their respective umbrellas. However, that doesn’t dissuade people from easily ignoring the latter because anything that is experimental is therefore difficult or unlistenable or denigrating the former because all postmodern philosophy is relativistic, saying all points of view are somehow equal. This, of course, is a straw man easily trotted out when someone needs to uphold Serious Science because god knows, it might be too difficult to quote a philosopher who is held in high esteem who really believes this. Sure, as the Sokal Hoax demonstrates, there is lots of philosophy written by idiots. Well, ok. There are journals in every discipline written by idiots. With the sufeit of academics writing secondary texts and only a limited amount of primary texts, not to mention the fact that academia, like any other field, is 95% mediocre, there is going to be a ton of bad, middling and purely atrocious work out there. “Proving” that some of these people don’t know what they’re talking about is, as Todd Barry noted about roasting Chevy Chase, “as easy as looking at fish in a barrel. It’s as easy as being somewhere near a barrel.”
The canard of the relativism of postmodern philosophy (which in its best form resembles nothing like the caricature of absolute relativism that people ascribe to the term) may be a relic of the 70s when questions of identity and subjectivity were being pushed to their logical extremes, but as the Aufhebung of extreme relativism and ABSOLUTE TRUTH plays out, a dynamic, attractor model is/may emerge to show both extremes for the lie they are.
However, as much I want this to be the mature understanding of what truth is, that is, as much as I want people to understand truth in terms of a bounded relativity, in terms of cultural realism and consensual tolerance and people like Latour and Bourdieu, the reality is that this is a very small part of academia, and most people believe in that single ABSOLUTE TRUTH (or, in some cases, a kind of relativism, that is, until something they actually care about comes into question, and then all bets are off).
Michael Shermer’s latest column in Scientific America, which I ran across through some links in my feed reader, made me think about what an active role mainstream science plays though in its own skepticism. Shermer says this early on:
The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled to the clicker culture of mass media where attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, at the movies, on the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist the Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and PSI. UFOs and ETIs. JFK, RFK and MLK—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and Tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. Such claims are an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. The truth is out there. I want to believe.
The question is, what allows pseudoscience to gain any kind of foothold in the public consciousness, especially living in the age we are living in, where science dominates all discourses? Is it an overpowering belief in relativity? A skepticism of authority? A complete misunderstanding of science? Maybe. I mean, a belief in real relativity is probably actually rare, and skepticism of authority is certainly rampant (And not in a good way, but burgeoning into conspiratorial and rightwing revolutionary worldviews. See the Homeland Security report cautioning against the rise of the ultraright), but it’s the last that does the most damage and what science itself, as a discipline, worldview and institution, helps to contribute towards.
Adorno and Horkheimer write early on in “The Concept of Enlightenment”:
“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. Bacon, “the father of experimental philosophy,” brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers.”
It’s actually rather difficult, without doing real research, to disentangle the entire affair, since there are no real causes and effects, but just co-evolving ideas. This is to say, it’s impossible to blame science and the Enlightenment or pseudoscience and myth alone for why people believe things which have no shred of empirical proof. Rather, it’s the complex dialectic between the two, where the latter tries to suppress the former, resulting in the Enlightenment, and then the former tries to suppress the latter – Adorno and Horkheimer’s “disenchantment of the world” – resulting in the current age, where gut instinct and “common” sense is prized, a notion that’s still difficult to dispel even with Obama’s so-called pragmatism setting the agenda.
Ideas can’t be eradicated through violence and suppression. History and dialectic make that clear. As some notion is suppressed, it bubbles up in different and most likely harmful ways. The current world-situation is obvious proof of that, but it also helps explain why myth and pseudoscience are so prevalent. Between the Enlightenment suppression and science’s own claims to ABSOLUTE TRUTH, claims which it cannot even begin to support, alternative, unempirical understandings of the world gain a real purchase. If science was more modest, if students were taught how it actually functions instead of being forcefed the myth of scientism and the scientific method (a myth which many scientists believe themselves), then pseudoscience, and especially creationism, wouldn’t have the power it does.
Besides the disenchantment of the world, it is these privileged claims to the truth that are really going to be the undoing of mainstream science. Like in any dialectical transformation, the structures that allow an idea to flourish also cause its own collapse, and in this case, what’s been happening is that science makes a claim to ultimate knowing, a claim it cannot fulfill, and the mythmakers start picking it apart at those moments of ill-fit. Even the best theories, in a complex, dynamic world, don’t have complete one-to-one correspondence with reality, and pseudoscience exploits the chinks in the armor to say, “Well, if science says that it is perfect, yet here there are some discrepancies, then therefore it can’t be right.” Logically it makes sense, and it’s science’s fault (or the public perception of science, or the dominant form of science, etc. – these are broad strokes after all. There’s no Science, just as there’s no Postmodern Philosophy. There is a standard science curriculum though in the United States where these things are taught, and it is that curriculum that does the damage, even if there is a contingent of scientists that don’t buy into scientism, which there most assuredly is.)
Prescriptions are obvious: stop making privileged claims to knowledge, create a better curriculum, incorporate myth into the world without giving it empirical power, etc. – all top-down approaches that will surely fail if implemented piecemeal, but might have a chance of doing something real – something to counter the tide of terrible and damaging pseudoscience – if enacted together, not that anyone really will outside of academia. As the current debate over health care and financial reform show, those in power do not relinquish that power willingly, and those with privileged claims to truth don’t give up that privilege willingly either.
Filed by andyb at June 24th, 2009 under philosophy
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April 28, 2009
1) In my quest to find people in mainstream media taking the lessons of non-linearity into account, I’ve still seen very little serious analysis of the financial crisis in these terms. Of course, via the Santa Fe Institute’s science blog, there is this really nice piece from The New York Times. Instead of assuming the future will be exactly like the present, the op-ed takes the changing, dynamic situation into account and uses that as its basis to advocate policy decisions. Plus, it takes seriously the notion of bottom-up economic organization - real bottom-up organization that says, “Look, a lot of this has to do with the stake homeowners have in their houses, and you won’t stave off the deepening of the crisis until you honestly take that into account.”
2) I taught a critical thinking course when I lived in Philly, and the main focus was institutional/systems analysis. The idea was, real critical thinking doesn’t flow out of idealized, rational systems, but rather from having a command of the constraints of whatever institution you find yourself within. Anyway, not in a cruel way, but in a realistic way, I would talk to the students and ask them about their economic backgrounds and what constraints that imposed on them from the outside and what the real possibilities were for their existences. Now, of course, because there are so many different trajectories, a working class or middle class economic background doesn’t bar people necessarily from the top echelons of society, but we can say it reliably does so, with the noted exceptions.
As well, my last year in grad school, I took Chuck Dyke’s complexity course. One of our assignments was a semester-long research project where we were to design a research program for examining the dynamics of the discipline of philosophy, i.e., what really drives the discipline? Without going into the specifics, what we did was to choose a number of representative departments. We then went back to the beginning of last century, to the point when philosophy departments really coalesced out of religion departments and became entities of their own and then mapped the trajectories of each person in the department for each year, from undergraduate to graduate school and every teaching position from post-doc to the end of their careers. Basically, we tried to do the American remake of Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus. We did this for three main domains: ivy league schools, schools with ivy league pretensions (I called them the petit-bourgeoisie of the academic world) and then newer schools which were just entering the system and had to figure out how to attract students. The trajectories we found we that if you start in the ivy leagues, you mostly ended up in the ivy leagues, but that if you were outside that system, it was extremely difficult to actually break into it, or if you did, your trajectory was never very stable. Thus, two of the biggest determining factors are economic background and who you know (the ivy leagues are rather incestuous).
Our study wasn’t the most rigorous, but it was nice to see this post the other day (well, not “nice”) which corroborates just how important economic background is for determining life trajectories. We’re not a meritocratic nation in any way. Of course, once you’re in a certain context, say an ivy league philosophy department, you have to take on the habitus as well, but even getting up to that point is determined in large part by economics. I’ve reproduced the chart from the post below as well:
(”view image” for the larger version)
3) Finally, something I mentioned in the last post was that I was interested in briefly looking at how non-evidenced-based our culture really is, or at least how our political and media class (classes?) rarely if ever holds anyone accountable for what they say or asks them to back up their statements with actual facts. Maybe the interpretation of the facts might be wrong or purposely misleading or whatever, but still just the act of using or asking for evidence to support a claim is crucial. This is an idee fixe of Glenn Greenwald, especially when it comes to beltway insiders supposedly speaking about “what Americans really believe”, completely disregarding polls that say the exact opposite (though as David Simon pointed out in his Bill Moyer’s interview two weeks ago:
“You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America – school test scores, crime stats, arrest stats – anything that a politician can run on [or] anything that somebody can get a promotion on, and as soon as you invent that statistical category 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is… The same game is played everywhere – nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution is supposed to do… If there’s an institution that is supposed to serve you or that you are supposed to serve, and it’s supposed to care for you and be a societal positive, it will betray you.”)
One example that really stuck with me was from two weeks ago. When Obama was releasing the torture memos, former CIA director Michael Hayden was interviewed by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, which you can see here. What bothered me more than Hayden’s point of view was that he said nearly nothing to back it up. Early on he claims, “On balance, the release of the memos harms American security.” And then further states that if “our enemies” know what our interrogation techniques are, then it moots them. The problem with his argument, if it can be called that, is that he offers absolutely no evidence that this harms American security nor that knowing an interrogation technique will negate its use. On a purely logical level, does knowing that you might be waterboarded actually negate the torture of being waterboarded? Besides the fact that as far as I know, torture doesn’t work. And I base this on scholar Darius Rejali’s interview on Democracy Now!, as well as the DOD’s own memos.
Filed by andyb at April 28th, 2009 under Uncategorized
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April 22, 2009
I was going to write a post about some odds and ends, including our contemporary culture that never ever asks anyone for evidence or to back up what they say, but I really only have time to talk about one thing, and since this showed up in my feed reader this morning, I’ll deal with that.
As the country starts coming around to supporting investigations and prosecutions for Bush officials who committed war crimes and as class rage grows (See both this post on the New York Magazine article about whiny rich people and Thomas Geoghegan’s excellent article “Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy” (Harper’s Magazine, April 2009) to see how Wall Street idiots acquired their wealth/attitude the first place), there are still many on the left that believe that this is all part of the plan for Obama.
The way Obama’s been deified by many has always baffled me. I don’t disagree that his election was an incredible symbolic victory, both for black people and for every ethical American/citizen of the world for whom Bush’s reign was like constantly getting your face cut off every moment of every day. But other than that, he’s a politician, a rather centrist democrat on most issues, and to believe he’s more than that always struck me as mere fantasy, fantasy that completely ignored any and all evidence to the contrary.
Anyway, a friend of mine posted a link to this on his blog this morning, a long post from Oftwomoinds, which starts like this:
Many observers, partisans non-partisans alike, have been mystified by President Obama’s continuation of the Bush/bankers/Treasury’s “privatize bonuses, socialize risks” campaign of taxpayer-funded bank bailouts, phony slight-of-hand “transparency” and political support for blatantly bogus accounting of banks’ profits, assets and losses.
The failure of the Obama administration to pursue real regulatory “change” (such as actually enforcing regulations that are already on the books instead of throwing bankers new squeeze toys like “relaxed” mark-to-fantasy accounting) has moved many from mystification to outrage.
Where’s the “change” in this continuation of Bush/bailout policies? What is the rationale of a supposedly “progressive” president in filling his financial administration with “investment banker Borgs”?
The post goes on to concoct a long speculative theory as to how Obama’s actions could really be a secret plan to discredit the banks so that Obama can get down to the real work of reorganizing. The post itself might be a joke; I’m not familiar enough with Oftwominds to do much more than speculate, but if not, it seems kind of insane to me. This is like a plan a cartoon villian concocts, where everything has to happen just right for it to be pulled off, almost like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who invests the government with such cunning and skill that they could devise a giant, intricate plan that is pulled off perfectly. What plan is every pulled off perfectly? I can’t get to the subway from my apartment without something going wrong.
Regardless of political persuasion, there is a tendency for a number of people - something I witnessed firsthand while adjuncting - to ignore simple logic and to twist facts well past their breaking point in order to get them to conform to one’s own beliefs. That is, rather than change beliefes, reality is tortured in order to make is fit. This has been a constant theme in many of the posts I write, and it’s one of the things that makes me feel rather hopeless about the left, who are really no better in this respect than anyone else in the spectrum.
Is it more believable that Obama had some ridiculous plan or that he’s simply a centrist democrat whose campaign was financed in large part by Wall Street? From a Democracy Now! interview with Noam Chomsky:
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think Obama chose to surround himself?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Because those are his beliefs. I mean, his support comes from the—his constituency is basically the financial institutions. Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are the main funders for both—you know, I mean, core funders for both parties, but considerably more to Obama than McCain.
You can learn a lot from campaign contributions. In fact, one of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of politics, as he calls it—very outstanding political economist—which essentially—I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state. And he takes a look at the formation of campaign contributors, and it gives you a surprisingly good prediction of what policies are going to be. It goes back a century, New Deal and so on. So, yeah, it can predict pretty well what Obama is going to do. There’s nothing surprising about this. It’s the norm in what’s called political democracy.
The Aufhebung between the Western belief in one truth and the postmodern relativist belief in infinite truth is a middle ground in which what is true about the world has a number of interpretations, or could have a number of interpretations, depending on how the facts of the matter are ordered. However, there will simply always be things that are just outside of that range of possibility, and in most cases, the range will be rather small. To twist the facts about Obama, to make him into a liberal messiah is to ignore the facts, and in fact, to neuter the left. Does Obama favor Wall Street? Yes. Does he also do things like release torture memos almost completely unredacted under severe political pressure not to do so? Yes, as well. As Glenn Greenwald notes:
There is an unhealthy tendency to want to make categorical, absolute judgments about the persona of politicians generally and Obama especially (”I like him”/”I don’t like him”; “I trust him/I don’t trust him”) rather than case-by-case judgments about his specific acts. “Like” and “trust” are sentiments appropriate for one’s friends and loved ones, not political leaders. A politician who does something horrible yesterday can do something praiseworthy tomorrow. Generally bad people can do good things (even if for ignoble reasons) and generally good people can do bad things. That’s why I care little about motives, which I think, in any event, are impossible to know. Regardless of motives, good acts (releasing the torture memos) should be praised, and bad acts (arguing against prosecutions) should be condemned.
Obama is not our friend; he’s our avatar.
Filed by andyb at April 22nd, 2009 under gripes
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April 14, 2009
One of the things that is essentially mindblowing about the linear thinking in the West, or perhaps globally at this point, is that it is either the result of simple, outright ignorance or the willful disregard of reality in order to attain one’s own ends at the expense of whatever: people, other countries, the ecosystem, etc. What I mean by this can be exemplified in the current discourse on the pirate problem off the coast of Somalia.
In the mainstream media - and I remember this going back eight months to reports I had heard on the BBC news last August and September - the pirates are framed as the Bad Guys in the media’s simplified Spaghetti Western story. Perhaps, the lawless, failed state status of Somalia is namechecked in order to highlight their desperation, and to perhaps give a somewhat legitimacy to their piracy. There was this on Democracy Now! this morning though, from a conversation between Amy Goodman and Mohamed Abshir Waldo, an analyst and writer of Somali descent:
AMY GOODMAN: A little more on the issue of toxic dumping, if you would, Mohamed Abshir Waldo. I don’t think people in the United States understand exactly what it is you’re referring to and how it affects people.
MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Well, toxic dumping, industrial waste dumping, nuclear dumping, as you are probably aware and have heard and many people know, for quite some time, in the ’70s mainly, in the ’80s, in the ’90s, there was a lot of waste of all these kinds that companies wanted to get rid of, following very strict environmental rules in their countries. So where else to take but in countries in conflict or weak countries who could not prevent them or who could be bought? So these wastes have been carried to Somalia. It’s been in the papers. It has been reported by media organizations like Al Jazeera, I think, like CNN. Many had reported about the Mafia, Italian Mafia, who admitted it, dumping it in Somalia for quite some time, for quite a long time.
And as we speak now, I heard yesterday, in fact, another vessel was captured in the Gulf of Aden by community—this time not pirates, by the community, when the suspected it, and it was carrying two huge containers, which it dumped into the sea when they saw these people coming to them. They have been apprehended. The vessel had been apprehended. Fortunately, the containers did not sink into the sea, but they are being towed to the coast. And this community has invited the international community to come and investigate this matter. So far, we don’t have action. So this dumping, waste dumping, toxic dumping, nuclear waste dumping has been ongoing in Somalia since 1992.
AMY GOODMAN: When I read your article, Mohamed Abshir Waldo, it reminded me of a controversial memo that was leaked from the World Bank—this was when Lawrence Summers, now the chief economic adviser, was the chief economist at the World Bank—in which it said, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted.” He said he was being sarcastic.
MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Actually, the more formal official concerned with this UN habitat has also confirmed in various reports that this has been dumped in Somalia. The special representative of the Secretary-General, Ould-Abdullah, who is now working with the Somali authorities, has also, I think, made a statement to that effect. So it is very well known. It’s not something hidden. It’s not something we are making up. The world knows, but it doesn’t do anything about it.
Earlier in the conversation, Waldo noted how a number of Western nations were also illegally fishing in the area, ignoring the complaints of the local communities. Thus, when a number of people take to piracy in response to both the illegal fishing and dumping, it is an eminently rational action (though morally perhaps not the best, however, if only goods are being stolen, and no one is actually being hurt, I find it difficult to really be virulently opposed). Regardless, piracy as a response to economic destruction is nothing new. A friend pointed me to this article today from The Huffington Post that goes more in depth into the subject.
The point of all of this is to highlight the atomistic and unconnected way in which we (in the West, in the world, in whatever boundaries one wants to really draw…at the very least, the descendants of the Enlightenment and of Western science) conceptualize the world. Actions are separated from their effects. Things people or nations do in one area do not affect people or nations in another area. Our understanding of reality takes precedence over actual reality that pushes back at us, and our political class desperately forces that understanding - their understanding - upon an increasingly and wildly divergent reality to an incredibly expected result of failure and violence. It’s not difficult at all to figure out what the result will be of trying to continually force the world into a conceptual box that can’t contain it. We’ve been experiencing the leaks for a long time, and now through the Bush years and even continuing into the Obama years, that box has become even more misshapen and grotesque. It’s like sending a gay man to one of those terrible Christian re-programming camps. What happens when you try to supress reality with a false or wildly-divergent understanding of reality? Well, it slowly falls apart and then collapses. One can’t predict, or shouldn’t try to predict the exact shape of this violence, but we can generally expect that as Obama and company try to save the neo-liberal system and the wealthy elite, as they try to ultraconservatively attempt to hold on to their failing model, and actually govern the world by these principles, the reaction should increasingly get more and more hostile. Even on human terms, it’s obvious this would happen. If someone repeatedly told you the world was a certain way, and that you had to act in accord with that belief, yet your experience and the collective experience (and it has to be collective, otherwise, you’re just a sad, conspiracy theorist railing against some fiction) of your peers affirms a divergent belief about the world, how would you feel? Well, angry of course. And if peoples’ lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, then moreso: furious, wrathful, enraged. And rightfully so.
I started reading Prigogine and Stengers’ Order Out of Chaos the other day in order to credibly write on systems that are far from equilibrium, systems like our economy, and they note many of these problems as arising from linear science’s idealized picture of the world and on the attempt to place that idealized vision on a messy reality. One of the things that I’ve been trying to do in my posts on the fiscal crisis is to really show the conceptual background that leads to this kind of incredible problem, and one of the main culprits that I hit upon again and again is that the economy is non-linear in nature, yet all our major theories (AKA neo-classical economics and Chicago School theories) and policies (neo-liberal mostly) are geared towards linear thinking. This crisis isn’t simply predictable from a Marxian framework, but is eminently assured to come about when you run a system for a long time based on a model that doesn’t accurately map the system. If I tell you to meet me somewhere in Manhattan, and I give you a map that inaccurately represents the terrain, it’s obvious form the outset what will happen.
Prigogine is a chemist famous for his work in dissipative structures, which are systems that operate thermodynamically far from equillibrium, systems which are chaotic and messy (though obviously which have structure). In the book of his and Stengers I’ve been reading, he notes the ascetic ideal of science, something of course which Nietzsche discussed in philosophy, something which has really carried over from our collective religious past. Again, as I wrote in the last post, one can never get rid of history. For philosophy alone, it was only at the turn of last century that the discipline went from being taught in religion departments to there being philosophy departments outright. That ascetic ideal is rife in analytic philosphy, and even the continental orthodoxy has touches of it. But science is plagued with it as well. One of the reasons creationism has any purchace as all is because of this ideal. If science were conceptualized by the scientific orthodoxy and the public as large less as an immaculate project and more as a human endeavor full of contradictions, then tiny problems in a theory wouldn’t give heart to a legion of idiots that believe in “intelligent design” because, well, tiny inconsistencies would be expected because no conceptual or physical system is without its contradictions.
Filed by andyb at April 14th, 2009 under philosophy
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March 6, 2009
I’ve been trying to write about the financial crisis for roughly eight months at this point, but each moment seems to require a new text. Marx was a good beginning, then David Harvey, then Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald, and before you know it, you’re stuck within a grand network of theories and facts that always needs more and more connections to make sense. Next it’s Wallerstein’s three volume work or Braudel’s or maybe Adorno or etc… Rather than take a stab at writing some all-encompassing tract then, let me try and say a few small things.
The problem, as I’ve seen it, hasn’t been just the corrupt and contemptible policies of the Bush administration, nor simply the timid, corporate-deferent policies of the Obama administration thus far (though there are signs that he is beginning to realize the magnitude of exactly what we’re experiencing and is, at least, beginning to act – tentatively – to remedy the absolute destruction wrought by the neoliberal policies of the last thirty years). Nor is it merely the fact that we’ve just gone through one of the most devastating periods of unrestrained capitalism in the history of the economic form, a period of Chicago School dominance and collusion between government and corporate factions. All of this is important, of course, of utmost importance for understanding the policy, for understanding the immediate, local problems and how those problems are amplified by certain global structures until you get a crisis like this. For that, scholars like Harvey and Wallerstein are invaluable, especially Harvey’s speech here and the last chapter in Wallerstein’s short book World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. In essence, the central contradictions of capitalism are all conflicts between the belief that there is infinite capital and infinite markets to exploit and the real, material finiteness of the existing, economic world. There’s a touch of devout religiosity inherent there, and this is mainly what I’d like to talk about here in this first post.
As I started to mention above, the problem isn’t simply the economic policies of the last thirty years, though they are directly and counterfactually the cause of the crisis, that is, if conditions had been different then, they would be different now. Perhaps. It’s obviously more complex than that, and as the problem is global and structural as well as local, the question of whether this was an inevitable outcome is surely a live and fruitful question. How the structures of unrestrained capitalism structure other economic and existential structures and are themselves structured by other structures and local-level actions has been the subject of the most worthwhile Marxian theory. To bring this up is just to quickly nod to the ridiculous complexity of examining a world-systems economy, let alone a singular nation-state’s. Securitized mortgages and CDOs look relatively benign by comparison.
Which is why in the background, the most damaging aspect of this fiasco has been the theoretical one. That is to say, if there had been a different theoretical understanding in the background – not just a different economic structure, but rather a real understanding of the contradictions, of the non-linearities of the system – then perhaps this wouldn’t be as bad as it is or is going to become. Let’s look at one aspect here – there are more to discuss later, such as the belief that our economy is in equilibrium or the mischaracterization of and misunderstanding of how wealth is created or the misappropriation of blame (predatory lending! people taking out mortgages they couldn’t pay back! Wall Street’s chicanery! deregulation! ) . A lot of this has a lot of local elements as well: vicious stupidity and voracious greed, and I think here I’d like to look at how one belief in particular that at one point in time maybe have simply had local, ground-level significance was amplified over time until it was a major contributor to the current crisis, mostly by being a foundational aspect of neo-liberal economic practice and Chicago School theory - the direct progenitors of the crisis itself.
(As a side note, one question I’ve repeatedly asked, yet have never had time to research, is the question of evidence, that is, what evidence was there ever for Chicago School style theory besides abstract models? I realize I’m not indoctrinated with Friedmanite beliefs or anything like that, and that the political realm is indeed the place of praxis, where these things get tested, but how insane is neoliberal theory just on its face? How were the original models created? Was Freidman just insane? A dishonest and terrible economist? A sociopath? Where was the evidence that these were intelligent courses of action and not simply guesses based on oblique, abstract models with no relation to reality? I realize that we’ve crossed the threshold of a paradigm, and that this has all been re-conceptualized such that the Chicago School just seems ill-advised at best and brainless at worst – at least to anyone with the sense to really logically question the underlying assumptions – but internally, within the former paradigm – what were the battles that played out? Who called for evidence?)
Regardless, one of the things I want to look at is the belief in a tabula rasa. This is something that is, on its face, biblical, but is also a major component of linear, Western rationalism. Noah, of course, is the epitome. The belief that one can wash away the world, start over fresh without the hindrance of the past is a notion that carries a lot of weight in our culture, and though it’s far from true, the fact that people act as if it were true gives it symbolic density, and there of course is how the dynamics of this belief are primordially set up. History – the history of the world, of a nation, a people, a single person – is dialectical in the utmost sense of the word: a roiling sea of contradictions that rhythmically plays out in time. Sometimes the contradictions are benign, sometimes they become exacerbated by circumstances or by their own logical friction. However, acting like this is not the case, that it is linear is a contradiction in and of itself. How that plays out for different people is a matter of empirical study. One old friend of mine was convinced that whatever malaise she was feeling was tied to the house she was living in, that if she just changed apartments, things would be better. She did, and perhaps things were indeed better for a time, a placebo effect or perhaps willing a certain feeling into existence ex nihilo, but it soon passed as the past erupted into that cocoon.
For whatever failings Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse has (and there are innumerable), to its credit, the theme that the past can’t simply be plastered over is the central tenet of the show, and it plays out in interesting ways. In fact, this theme is so prevalent in fiction that it’s cliché. A History of Violence. Battlestar Galactica (the new one). Most serial fiction with real dramatic weight or any film that deals with generations or the past. And the moral is always the same. History is a palimpsest that never settles. It peels and leaks and bursts through and becomes the present and future in surprising and incalculable ways that surpass our best expectations. Yet the Western scientific paradigm that bases its successes on (the fictional standard of) perfect predictions ad infinitum is at odds with this. The real world progresses dialectically, while Western scientific rationalism understands existence as a linear movement. Like Freudianism, the weight of these beliefs gives it heft and mass and semblance, and in that there is indeed a second contradiction, related to the first one I mentioned.
So, besides the numerous conceptual, theoretical and material contradictions that come out of the structures of capitalism (again, the major one being that it calls for the endless accumulation of capital in a world of real, existing limits), there are also a number of concurrent theoretical concerns that are connected to these through the co-evolution of the ideas within Western, and later, global culture. If we look at how ideas are organized, how they are connected, how they evolve and change and how they change each other, we can begin to get a sense of just why this idea of the tabula rasa is so ludicrous, and if so, then why the political elite are so ignorant and cruel.
The first metaphor I always grasp for to explain the past is that of a blob: some blobby, jelly-like mass that moves, and as it moves, it reconfigures itself. Parts of the mass that were inner move to the outside and other parts shift back and forth. And it changes shape and transforms, yet is still made up of the same constituent parts it began with – though some are invariably left behind in its wake, bits that broke off and such, and all that remains of the detritus is a residue. Another thought that recently came to me is a network of nodes connected to each other in perhaps a scale-free network, but perhaps that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the nodes also double as joints, so in effect this historical model is a giant articulated mass. When you push on one of the nodes that affects other ones, but not all of them. Remove a node or a link and the same things happens, parts are affected others are left the same. Change the shape by pushing or pulling the nodes. Each new stage retains parts of the former stage, but again, nothing truly ever goes away, it’s just therein a different form.
Thinking of Foucault, I wonder in what way referring to a financial institution as a “house” is a monarchic echo?
Regardless of either the blob or articulated network of interconnected lines model of history, there can be no such thing as a tabula rasa because there is no ground zero blank state. There is just history and its transformations. One of the most important recognitions in evolutionary theory was the acknowledgment that contingencies play the largest part in the narrative. Simply winding the clock back on a complex system doesn’t mean it will play out in the same way again. History isn’t a succession. However, the political elite and their academic sycophants have a different model in mind, one where history is like an onion, and all one has to do is peel back the layers to arrive at some virgin territory.
Naomi Klein documents this in her book The Shock Doctrine. Using the analogy of shock therapy for mental patients, she explains how the same tactics were used on whole societies. And of course, when neither resulted in a tabula rasa – since it’s a myth borne of a faulty model – the only way to try and things together was through massive violence. Violence to generate the blank slate and then violence to try and put things back together when that didn’t work. Klein writes early on about the sociopathic psychologist Ewen Cameron. “According to his published papers from the time, he believed that the only way to teach his patients healthy new behaviors was to get inside their minds and ‘break up old pathological patterns’. The first step was ‘depatterning’, which had a stunning goal: to return the mind to a state when it was, as Aristotle claimed, ‘a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written’, a tabula rasa. Cameron believed he could reach that state by attacking the brain with everything known to interfere with its normal functioning – all at once. It was ‘shock and awe’ warfare on the mind” (31).
Later, she writes about the invasion of Iraq, beginning with a quote of one of Cameron’s colleagues: “The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem. Cameron wanted to drill right through and to hell with the layers. But, as we later discovered, that layers are all there is.” In the next paragraph, she writes, “Iraq’s shock therapists blasted away at the layers too, seeking that elusive blank slate on which to create their new model country. They found only piles of rubble that they themselves had created, and millions of psychologically and physically shattered people – shattered by Saddam, shattered by war, shattered by one another. Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up. Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient feuds brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendetta from each new attack. – on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a ministry, a hospital. Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking” (372).
In this, Klein gets at the central, unsophisticated mistake of the ruling elite. I wrote about this idea in a earlier post that I think is worth taking a look at, but if you have families, cities, societies, cultures and subcultures arranged around certain organizing principles – attractors that they circle around in a basin of attraction – not strict rules, but rather a habitus, and you go in and disrupt those relations, all you have left are a lot of free floating agents looking for a new attractor – a new habitus. The transient paths they take in the search for this new attractor are extremely chaotic and always will be. You can’t predict the path the chaos will take, but what you can predict is that it the chaos itself will exist. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence – and there were many, many people who warned of the crisis (going back to Marx himself – not this specific one, but of the way capitalism breeds them – or again, in abstract, Wallerstein’s explanation of Kondratiev A and B phases.) – but anyone with any kind of intelligence could have predicted the current financial crisis without knowing the exact form it would have taken: as Richard Walker points out in an interview on Pacifica Radio for a series called Capitalism and Its Discontents, mainstream economists hem and haw about not having enough data points to accurately predict the exact length of the phases, but the exact length doesn’t matter; what does matter are the dynamics that drive the phases in the first place and that create an eminently predictable pattern – the limitless accumulation of capital (:30).
Filed by andyb at March 6th, 2009 under Uncategorized
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February 5, 2009
Let’s see if writing in here can be more constant than every few months:
My relationship to football is on par with my relationship to Christianity. I don’t really care about either, but if I want to navigate the culture in any meaningful way, I better know something about the both of them. Which is how I found myself a number of times this year at a friend’s house to watch Steelers games, though my interest was mainly in the food being served (Oreos and pizza at the Superbowl) and hanging out with pals. As a relative outsider though, what struck me more than anything else about the game, especially the Superbowl, was how over-officiated it was. Almost every play was flagged or there was some problem that had to be remanded to the care of an official to pour over in instant replay in what appears in my mind as an giant, ancient mutoscope.
Talking to my roommate Ben - a writer for mlb.com and eminently more knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of this than I am - afterward, he remarked on the way in which the spontaneity of the game is being slowly drained out. It’s almost impossible at this point to enjoy a play because a person can’t trust the scene playing out before her eyes. No matter what happens or what is interpreted, it first has to be funneled through the senses of the referee, and then - only then - are we allowed access to the event. Thus, the officials stand as mediators between us and reality, a reality that we’re not allowed unfettered access to. This is all well and fine if a play is flagged here and there, but when it’s every play on every down for every drive, the game is no longer something immediate, but rather stands apart from us at a distance, always awaiting the judgment of the ref.
There’s obviously any number of philosophical parallels here, but what I think is most fascinating is - primarily - the way this mirrors the political situation of the past eight years, but subsequently as well, the way in which Enlightenment certainty is so overpowering that it is even starting to dominate sports, arguably an activity that should mostly be about the visceral and the immediate. Politically, the last eight years, and even now with the dominant Obama worship, has been about abdicating our authority in the name of say, fear of terrorists or because we have a belief that the government will do right by its citizens or for whatever reason. They’re all flimsy when you actually work past that initial emotional push of fear and I don’t really need to go into the specifics as people like Glenn Greenwald are much better equipped than I am to detail them. The point is more to link it to a general trend of deferment that, as such, perhaps as this surfaces more and more in sports, it’s an indicator of just how corrupt this social system is. That is, if we’re no longer even trusting our own eyes to feed us information and must always wait for the expert assessment, we’re really living a degraded kind of existence.
All of that is up for debate, of course, and the point isn’t to say that one should never listen to experts - that in fact is what’s been politically wrong for a long time, the trust in the gut instinct instead of empirical testing, and in fact what is truly interesting here is the contradiction between the immediacy of a moment, of being part of something - part of a group, say here, The Steeler Nation - and that flush feeling of experiencing an event along with innumerable others, between that and the truly important need for empirical confirmation. Thus the dialectic swings between these two poles.
The driving force behind much of this as well is that need for certainty that sits in the background, the one imported from Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment science. I’ve always thought that this desire, more than anything else, is why our scientific systems are conceptually screwed up and why things like Creationism even have any purchase at all. If one expects certainty beyond any shadow of a doubt out of life and out of science, then when it can’t deliver - as no such theoretical construct ever could - one thinks there’s something wrong with it. So when evolutionary theory can’t explain every last possible instance, even though it is - in its myriad forms - an excellent explanatory device, better than any other by far, people begin to think it is problematic and needs to be supplanted or addendumed or completely effaced altogether. Teach the controversy after all. If we had realistic understandings of how technoscience works, there’d be no room for these claims because they would a priori be excluded from the system.
Ben is worried in addition because of the introduction or possible introduction of the instant replay into the MLB, where baseball is already a rather slow sport. As well, for years, people have been suggesting that some kind of chip be placed in footballs so that we all know for sure when it crosses the plane. Not that that would have helped decide that final Holmes TD catch, but of course, the problem is that in building all these structures to reduce deliberation to one trajectory - the CORRECT path - reality, in all it’s myriad tentacling out, will always, always elude these structures. The desire for this certainty leads us to abdicate our will to these structures replacing intelligence with adherence to an orthodoxy as the primary method of figuring things out. No one can tell how this contradiction will eventually work itself out, but the most salutary result would be a decision process that allows for viscerality and immediacy but that is founded on the empirical.
As Chuck Dyke writes, “There is no doubt that with all the gods gone, necessity and certainty will be harder to find. Contingency will have to be respected, and that’s one of the hardest things for the monotheists to choke down.” Here, in his essay “Natural Speech: A Hoary Story”, Dyke works out a metaphor between monotheistic and pagan science, the former being that unifying, atomistic, rationalist linear science, while the later is about non-linearities and complex interactions. The difference between the two being that the former looks to the Law to explain itself, while the latter instead is founded upon praxis, upon the act first, and yet the visceral isn’t an excuse for mere gut feeling, but rather sets true limits on our theoretical structures, instead of our theoretical structures setting the limits on what actually exists.
“But I don’t really care…if the world conforms to my word. I want it to conform to my act. When I’m pulling on a weed I don’t really give a shit what Linnaeus had to say about it. I want it to come up, roots and all. And the fact that it’s a weed is embedded not in a cladistic tree, but in my garden. In fact, we might reflect on the way that the cladistic trees themselves are secondary, summaries of interactive engagements among the gardens, soils, rains, and other contingencies of times past. At least those of us who tell evolutionary tales would reflect in that way.”
(from How Nature Speaks, Dyke and Haile, ed. 2006, Duke University Press)
Filed by andyb at February 5th, 2009 under Uncategorized
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August 20, 2008
I just ran across this anecdote about Sydney Morgenbesser which reads like something my comedy writing partner and I would write for our alternate dimension counterparts The Riot Act.
“One day in New York City, Morgenbesser put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the subway steps. A policeman approached and told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and that he had not yet lit up. The cop repeated his injunction. Morgenbesser repeated his observation. After a few such exchanges, the cop saw he was beaten and fell back on the oldest standby of enfeebled authority: “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” To this the old philosopher replied, “Who do you think you are—Kant?” His last word was misconstrued, and the whole question of the Categorical Imperative had to be hashed out down at the police station. Morgenbesser won the argument.”
Filed by andyb at August 20th, 2008 under philosophy
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August 13, 2008
This is just something quick, but I was reading the Woody Allen interview in today’s Onion AV Club (and first of all, he just finished a movie starring Larry David!), and Allen said something that really summed up what I was trying to talk about in an earlier post in a much more eloquent and succinct manner than I managed to. Responding to a question about some of his darker films and whether they actually were dark or just misinterpreted:
“No, my films are misinterpreted all the time. I don’t mind that. Everybody’s films are misinterpreted. But there’s no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them. But those are not any darker than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and certainly no darker than Cassandra’s Dream or Match Point. These are all quite dark films, and the films that I’m making at the time, contrary to what people might think, are not a reflection of what’s going on in my life. People think that the way I feel in my private life at the moment reflects how I make films, but everyone who makes films, or does any kind of creative art, will tell you that that’s not so, that sometimes when I’m feeling my happiest and everything’s going well in my life, and my love life is wonderful and my health is wonderful, I’ll make my darkest, most depressing kind of thing. And other times, when things are not going well for me and I’m having a hard personal time, I could be making my silliest comedies. I was not in a particularly happy state of mind or place in my life at all when I made Take The Money And Run and Bananas. This is not a good time in my life. There’s no reflection in one’s personal life, and I’ve heard this from other artists as well that people tend to think the product is a reflection of their personal feeling at the time, when in fact it isn’t, really. It’s just a matter of what idea they can come up with, or whatever strikes them inspirationally, having no relation to their personal mood.”
Filed by andyb at August 13th, 2008 under philosophy
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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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