(Gorilla Gr)odds and ends
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