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November 7, 2007
Over the weekend, I played Bioshock at my friend’s house for the first (only?) time. It was pretty fun and creepy, and the plot is that an experimental city which was the outgrowth of a Randian philosophy turns (surprise) into a dystopian nightmare.I was thinking about it as I was walking to the subway today and I started to think about the guy that wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and why these people have such large followings when their ideas are just rehashed bits of pseudo-philosophy with no larger significance in the history of ideas, and well, right there is the appeal. Basically, if you want to talk and write about the world philosophically, one is required - as long as one is being intellectually honest - to delve into the history of philosophy and join in the conversation. What typically makes my students’ papers bad is when they write at length about their own opinions without ever connecting those opinions to anyone else. Let’s be frank, who gives a shit what a nineteen-year-old thinks about the world dissociated from any other opinion? What is interesting is seeing that viewpoint play off against other viewpoints (i.e., a nineteen-year-old’s philosophical understanding of the world isn’t a priori uninteresting, just uninteresting if it never breaks out of a self-centeredness). So, what makes people like Rand popular is that reading her, you get easy answers and you get an entire worldview boiled down into some horrendously written books. In other words, people like Rand instantaneously appear on the scene, and to understand them requires little to no work on the reader’s part. Not simply that their ideas are naive and silly, but moreso than that, that one doesn’t have to do any intellectual archaeology in order to understand what someone like Rand is talking about. Whereas, to understand Foucault, you need to understand Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and Kant and Plato and etc. (or at least be familiar with them). Which is also why pop-philosophy is ultimately shallow and unrewarding. What makes someone like Heidegger interesting isn’t merely his ideas, but also the journey one has to go through to understand those ideas.
Anyway, to switch gears, a friend posted this Zizek piece on a messageboard I post on today, and I thought it was fairly interesting, although somewhat seemed to miss the point about a lot of struggle on the left and a lot of the different strategies, or in fact, was rather dismissive of these different tactics without any fair evaluation. Since it was a book review, I’d imagine there are space constraints, and in addition, I’m not so super-familiar with Zizek enough to know what his usual writing is like; I’ve only read a few essays of his online. They’ve always struck me as rather dissociated from life despite the fact that he’s very much into referencing pop culture. But anyway, he might have been so dismissive simply because he didn’t have the room to be anything but.
Regardless, my problem with what he’s written lies not so much with his methodology, but rather with his unreflective acceptance of using the machinery of the state to force change in a top-down fashion, which he seems to endorse in his lauding of Chavez. It’s perhaps my own unfamiliarity with the specifics of Venezuelean politics, but I’m not sure how what Chavez is doing is creating “a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics”. Of course, I favor more Bourdieuian approaches to understanding social systems, so it could just be that I can’t see the moves Zizek is making, but what’s more apparent than that is that every single one of the tactics he lists, including Chavez’s, are problematic simply because the dominant economic system is capitalism, and even creating new spaces within which to work and new ways of governing outlier parts of the periphery of the system don’t address the overall concerns. Again though, utilizing all these strategies at once perhaps has the ability to affect change in that it has the ability to push the entire system across some threshold of stability (e.g., if Venezuela becomes internally stable, it could always be an exemplar or it could even effect the periphery in a way that the core of the system becomes destabalized, especially if the core is also being destabalized by internal pockets of dissension and internal pockets which exhibit new ways of existing).
In one sense, Zizek is right in that to actually affect change, one has to be in a position of power or one has to place oneself in a position where the powerful are affected, but all of that is meaningless if it doesn’t affect and create new and different practices that can be implemented successfully in everyday life; a strategy he derides here:
“Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).”
I’m not sure why one would laud a unitary strategy anyway. Aren’t all the methodologies he lists, including Chavez’s, useful in the global struggle against capitalism? Some perhaps more than others, but still?
Filed by andyb at November 7th, 2007 under philosophy
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November 6, 2007
I haven’t written here in a few weeks because I’ve been busy with other projects and my weekends have been taken up with various things – last week was my ten-year high school reunion and this week I was visiting my sister in Pittsburgh for her birthday – but these trips, steeped as they were with nostalgia, inundated with it, it reminded me of the introduction I wrote to a paper on complexity and disturbative art (Danto’s academic speak for pranks and other kinds of subversive art – although since he does mostly analytic aesthetics, his understanding of it is drained of the political so he never actually begins to understand the significance of these aesthetic strategies…read it for yourself. Here’s the citation: Arthur C. Danto. “Art and Disturbation” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). It’s been a while since I read it, but halfway through it becomes an essay on Nietzsche that I’m inclined to say is probably not good, both because of my prejudice against analytic philosophers trying to understand anything outside of the narrow system they’ve created for themselves and also because I’ve been re-reading On the Genealogy of Morals and Kaufmann kind of mocks Danto in one of the footnotes [in the first essay, I think, if you want to check it out].)
Anyway, last year, I was teaching Foucault’s The Order of Things in a class called Science in Context. The point of using the text was to give some philosophically oriented case studies to go along with the Kuhn, to really reinforce the idea of Aufhebung in science vis-à-vis truth, which Foucault demonstrably does in that book. There were good and bad things about using that text. Bad because it’s difficult for me to read and I’m trained to understand that kind of stuff, so it must have been sheer hellish miasma for my students, but it was good because it is really challenging and also because Foucault is so thorough with his research. I doubt very many of them read it anyway, so maybe there was no problem. These things are difficult to suss out. Use a lackluster text that everyone can understand easily or use a difficult text that few will get at all. My pedagogical strategy, which is still very much in the formulative stages, is to go with the latter because I think the journey of figuring these things out is much more important than getting to some immediate destination by the end of the semester.
Anyway, the first chapter of the Foucault text is a long essay on Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas. Seemingly dissociated from the text, Foucault uses the discussion of the painting to develop the themes that are omnipresent in the rest of the book. When I first read this, and this is a bit embarrassing, but I almost cried. Here, Foucault, in this academic text was being literary and writing interesting things – and although on the whole he’s a very dry writer (and perhaps that’s just because I’m reading English translations, so who knows) – and it broke my heart because of the hole I was being forced into. My chief complaint about academic philosophy, and this isn’t in every case but many of them, was that there’s no room to develop different writing styles and the time that you spend learning the singular academic style could be spent on cultivating your own style. I’m not talking about writing experimental prose, but rather that you pay attention to the rhetorical and pedagogical aspects of what you’re doing, rather than just simply spill words out on a page in as concise and sober a manner as possible. I mean, everyone in the analytic school simply boils the history of philosophy down to a series of propositions, but we’re in a tradition that includes the dialogues of Plato, the meditations of Descartes and the polemics of Nietzsche. Ignoring this because it doesn’t fit your intellectual worldview is ridiculously intellectually dishonest. But I have been digressing.
This first chapter broke my heart because a paper I had written the year earlier, I had been criticized for doing the exact same thing, using the introduction to set up the themes without directly speaking on the subject at hand. Mind you, I was, and still am, a novice when it comes to writing academic philosophy, and I don’t just mean writing in that sober style, but writing in my own voice and with my own idiosyncratic rhetorical devices, and part of me wants to find a department that would actually allow me the leisure to develop that style and part of me wonders if I can even do that in a university setting and part of me wonders if it’s just bad anyway regardless of the context. But the last two weeks’ fulsome expanse of nostalgia reminded me of this and of the introduction I wrote, which I’ll include here:
Nostalgia; three themes: dissonance, complexity and disturbance. The world created by nostalgia is almost assuredly in every case a past situated within the hazy half-light between having existed and having never existed. Drained of the quotidian, with the phenomenal feel of the heartache siphoned off, all that is left is a residue of our experience. Such is the nature of nostalgia though. We all recognize that the affinity we feel for the past is doctored, falsified in parts, but nevertheless we accept it; there is no tension because we know a nostalgic past exists only within us and therefore cannot be held against the world as a true object for comparison. Hence the melancholy; a nostalgic yesterday is only a past for the person that holds it, and therefore history is no longer a shared experience. Each of us is alone within our individual pasts.
There is a curious feeling created by some fiction though that is analogue to this; it evokes a feeling of melancholic longing for a past that never was at all , not simply one that fluctuates between existence and non-. This is false nostalgia; it is like nostalgia proper yet carries with it a hint of disconcertedness, of vertigo. There is Ben Katchor’s comic Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. The art is decidedly anachronistic. It recalls a New York that once existed, the New York of Allen’s Radio Days or the America Ben Flesh inhabits in Elkin’s The Franchiser. Hard lines and rough shading, blocks of small businesses, cheap, rumpled suits, the immigrant experience dissolving into American culture – these things evoke the feeling of what New York once was, yet the text, the subject matter, creates a surreal experience. This is from an installment entitled “Purkinje Island”. “Safely isolated from the populous streets of midtown by the rushing of a river, yet visible from the shoulders of a tall man, stand the assorted ruins of Purkinje Island: the crumbling benches and mud-filled pools of the first American Tapeworm Sanctuary, the overgrown and neglected Manikin Burial Ground, the abandoned municipal saliva storage tanks, the ruins of an asylum for pretzel addicts and the base of a fallen monument to the physiologist who identified those tiny reflections of table lamps and intimate friends which appear on the surface of an eye.” It is at once a New York that existed and a New York that has never existed. What Katchor’s comic evokes does not waver between the two positions, but occupies them both at the same time. The most dissonance is created when two strings are tuned a beat apart, and in this way, the most dissonance can be created by art when a depiction of reality and reality are out of sync by only a frame.
Nostalgia works in part by simplifying the past, wringing out all the complexity, and reducing it to one rosy-colored dimension. These are the basic understandings we assign to arbitrary divisions in the past. In a base ten culture, decades become units to be characterized under a single heading. There is a conception of the 1960s and 70s as a tumultuous period. The same characterization might simply hold for the rest of the 20th century, for the entire 20th century or for all of human history for that matter, but the bromide of those times is that of social unrest. This characterization, coupled with the movement since Duchamp’s era away from a necessary understanding of art illuminated by the traditional aesthetic categories, provides us with facile social and aesthetic reasons for why the art of disturbation – the art that disrupts the status quo – appears on the American scene at this point. However, what of the philosophical dimension?
Katchor, Ben, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 11.
Filed by andyb at November 6th, 2007 under philosophy
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October 14, 2007
I am going to try and upload these more often, but it takes fucking forever. Maybe I can just sendspace the mixes. Or maybe someone can suggest something else.
Anyway, here’s episode 2 “Everyone’s Waiting” made just after the Six Feet Under finale aired.
Easily bored episode two: Everyone’s Waiting
Filed by andyb at October 14th, 2007 under music
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October 9, 2007
I wish I’d been reading enough to warrant an entry earlier than this one, but the fact is up until recently I’ve been trying to catch up on some fiction, things I didn’t get to read whilst in grad school: a little Alasdair Gray, some Joseph McElroy, and also lots of comics including The Walking Dead and Akira - the manga series of which puts the movie to shame.
Anyway, I was talking to my friend John the other day. John lives in Glasgow where he had attended University of Glasgow for his masters in literature, I think. He had been pretty excited because a favorite author of ours, Harry Mathews, was doing a reading there, and John had gotten to hang out with him for a few days. If you’ve yet to read any Mathews, I think he’s a wonderful writer - experimental yet grounded in the psychological and realistic elements of a traditional narrative, surreal yet never at the expense of the story, basically one of the most well-rounded and inventive authors out there, and I’m not really giving him his due because that’s not why I wanted to write this.
As John and I were talking, he told me about the plans he’s had for a new vlog that’s meant to be more than the usual person-talking-into-the-camera which is prevalent in 2007, and wants is to be more like the the documentaries of this-guy-whose-name-I-forget-and-will-fill-in-later. So, John’s first topic is to talk about Putney Swope, a favorite film of his, and one I’ve grown to appreciate for its nonsensical facets and perhaps because Mr. Show pays homage to it, although it could just be a coincidence.
John and I began to talk about the legacy of subversive films though and how they were quite common in the 70s and now most, if not all, mainstream comedies are, while being funny in a lot of cases, or at least the Apatow ones usually are, today tepid in comparison. There’s lots of reasons this is so, a large number of them being economic. Subversive films of the 70s happened to be profitable to the studios at that time, where now studios don’t like to take their chances. One could posit a number of reasons. Off the top of my head, the fact that Vietnam era and post-Watergate era cynicism was new and movies expressing that kind of cynicism were keyed into that cultural feeling and now that that cynical feeling has graduated to being the background hum for all of our current politics, we kind of take it for granted. Yes, most politicians are greedy and hypocritical and some are just horrid human beings, but what are you going to do? It’s partly why people buy into conspiracy theories - if you can’t do anything about the way the world is (because there’s a giant conspiracy or because supposedly that’s the way politics works), it takes the responsibility off of one’s shoulders. All one can do is shrug and get on with one’s life.
There’re lots of other contributing factors. I seem to remember from a film class about the state of the motion picture industry at that time and how they financed those films for various economic reasons dealing with the stability of the studio system…and if anyone has some concrete information about that hazy memory from my past, please contribute.
John’s point though, despite the fact that there is rarely if ever a subversive comedy in the mainstream cinema, was more that the possibility of being subversive has been taken away due to the fact that almost every taboo or limit has been reached. Or at least every taboo or limit that the mainstream market will tolerate has been reached. There are still some things that a mainstream audience will not tolerate and that are safe from mass commodification, at least for now (who’d be dumb enough to try and predict the future?) - modern composition, noise music, pure surreality in film, difficult narratives, experimental techniques, etc. I mean, I’m sure the market for those things is larger than those in charge of studios will admit it is - after all, no one’s ever gone broke underestimating their audience, as the old saw goes - but the impending failure of amazing shows like The Wire and Friday Night Lights, both amazing shows and critical darlings but have yet to find an audience, makes me wonder if I have too much hope for “the mainstream” (whatever that means really) or if its just that they weren’t promoted correctly or if people have been disciplined to like shitty media or etc.. At least The Wire is on HBO and somewhat safe from the whims of the Nielsons. They’re on their final season anyway, so no big deal there. But I’m not sure if FNL will survive another season, if it even makes it halfway.
So, we kind of have to draw our boundaries. Not every taboo or limit has been reached outside of the mainstream of corporate-sponsored/underwritten art in this country, but within the limits, it probably has. So, what does it mean to be subversive today? Sarah Silverman doing an episode of her show about the abortions her character has had? I’m not sure breaking taboos is necessarily subversive in 2007. In fact, I was left kind of cold by that episode…if it wasn’t for people like Jay Johnston and Paul F. Tompkins, the show would be one pseudo-offensive thing after another. So, I want to say that just being offensive isn’t really subversive. It’s just kind of annoying.
There has to be more to being subversive. The idea of the subversive is to create a camouflaged opposition, an idea or concept that opposes a dominant one but that is dressed up in the aesthetic of the dominant concept. It becomes subversive only through a masquerade of sorts - the mechanisms and delivery system of the dominant conceptual/epistemological system that hide beneath it a direct critique of that system.
So, a subversive film is going to be a satire and a good subversive film is not going to be broad enough to let you know it’s a satire, or rather, it can let the viewer in on the joke, but only when the viewer already recognizes what is going on. The satire-as-subversive exists to have its cake and eat it to - it needs to be a legitimately good film by whatever the prevailing historical standards are, but it also needs to smuggle in that critique through that legitimacy. Think of a film like Little Murders, ostensibly a romantic comedy that devolves into a surreal critique of 70s society. All mainstream comedies today are partly grossout comedies paired with a cloyingly sweet romantic narrative, the worst of which are the Farrelly Brothers’ films, the best being Apatow’s films which, while trying to capture the diction of how people talk somehow manage to miss the reality of how people act. There are some genuine nice moments in films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Superbad, but they all feel like they’re lacking substance.
As much as I love modern comedies like Safe Men and Wet Hot American Summer, they have absolutely no subversive quality to them at all. Perhaps WHAS in the way that it plays with genre conventions and has elements of surreality to it, but those are also common postmodern tropes and the fact that Gremlins II uses various metafictional techniques shows the limits of metafiction as a subversive strategy past the 70s.
I wonder this then, has the era of the subversive film passed by, at least for the moment, and is TV the next place to look for these things? Greenaway, in one of the interviews in that book of interviews with him
talked about how TV has many untold possibilities as an artistic medium that the economic constraints often excise (my paraphrase of his words).
I think of subversive as something like Wonder Showzen. Week after week for its two season run, they would constantly amaze me with their overt political critiques, their critiques of their own show, of TV in general, etc. (and their outright disdain for what they were doing, or for the fact that they were on MTV2) all of it hidden (perhaps not so hidden) within the facade of a kids’ show. I don’t really have to go into how the kids’ show format helped to do that, but TV has all the hallmarks - the ability to be watched by a large mainstream audience - or at least the possibility of that happening - of a medium for subversiveness - a critique of the dominant system concealed within the dominant aesthetic strategy.
For something to be really subversive though, one just has to get lucky. The conditions have to be just right for these things to be produced. For every Wonder Showzen, there are a ton of ideas that no network in their right mind would finance. The key to subversion is to find the right audience and then work out a way to entertain that audience while delivering your message.
What a shitty, pat summation.
Filed by andyb at October 9th, 2007 under philosophy
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September 15, 2007
This afternoon, I’ve been reading a series of interviews with Foucault collected as Power/Knowledge. It’s quite good so far, but I don’t really want to write about it yet. However, it did get my brain worked up enough to think about some things in complexity.
So, in the first interview, Foucault is debating some pro-Mao prick - I mean, he’s not a prick in the debate, but, well, knowing what we know about the Cultural Revolution, it’s tough to not think of this putz as a schmuck, especially (and I’m guessing here) since he/she’s probably some bourgeois prick slumming it, like the rich kids that live in poor neighborhoods on their parents’ dime because the working class possesses some ineffable air of coolness that cash can’t acquire (which is the name of my sequel to that movie starring McDreary from that shitty show).
Anyway, he starts talking about class contradictions, and it gets me thinking. I’m teaching a logic class this semester, and I spent the first week or so explaining why this will never help them actually understand how people reason and that if they forget that supposedly this has to do with the real world, they’ll be better off. So, it’s just an elaborate game, something to stimulate their brain, puzzles to figure out - and not a system for finding truth.
And I mentioned briefly that real logic - dialectical logic -works because it acknowledges that all systems of thought are inherently contradictory and the contradictions internal to the system are what cause it to transform into the next system of thought. Some things are negated, some things are preserved: Aufhebung. You know, the whole Hegelian rap.
Right, so contradictions.
I’m thinking about this, and I’m thinking about how complexity theory works as a theory about how systems - any systems in general - and here, specifically, a system of thought - that have complexly interacting components and that move with a patterned regularity but are unpredictable (i.e., there is a pattern, but it never repeats itself), how these systems can move into regimes where there is contradictory behavior and how this behavior can quickly send the system into chaos.
That’s a short form of it. But, and I don’t know how to articulate it yet, the idea of bifurcations in a physical system:
and contradictory modes of thought within a single social system…I wonder how far the analogy can go, and what use it could have in the analysis of belief systems, an analysis using some kind of dialectal logic.
Filed by andyb at September 15th, 2007 under philosophy
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September 9, 2007
Although this really isn’t the place to put this, I’m not sure where else to, so whatever.
I have been making mixes for a Pittsburgh-based internet radio thing for the past few years or so, and I’ve noticed that the person that I was making them for has stopped doing this stuff. Maybe it had to do with the legislation about internet radio and all that stupid shit that I don’t really have anything coherent to say about it beyond swears. Anyway, I figured I could at least put the mixes up here since I spent time on making them. They’re largely just whatever I was listening to at the time I made that specific mix.- for the most part, indie rock and modern composition. So, here’s the first mix, that I made a couple of years ago. I’ll do these once a week or so until someone stops me, I guess.
Easily Bored episode one: The Pilot
Filed by andyb at September 9th, 2007 under music
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September 2, 2007
I guess my posts will probably oscillate between being narratively driven, i.e., me actually explaining things, and being a mad dash to write down whatever disparate things flow forth from my brain - my last post being definitively one of the latter type. I mean, maybe the last post is comprehensible if you’re also trying to work through the implications of complexity theory or already have, but if not, well, I’m not too worried I guess about the readability of the hasty ones, especially since their obfuscatory character will fade into the background in the long-run.
Anyway, since the end of last semester - my final semester - I’ve been reading a book of Immanuel Wallerstein’s entitled The Politics of the World Economy:
Wallerstein has formed, along with Chuck Dyke, Pierre Bourdieu and Alan Garfinkel the quadrumvirate that has informed my thinking about complexity and social systems. Of course, “my thinking” just means “the bits and pieces I’ve cobbled together from my elementary understanding of these guys’ works” and maybe in a decade or two I can use the phrase “my thinking” without eliciting a chorus of supercilious brows from my imaginary, and perhaps real, interlocutors. But, still, what I mean is that my current academic trajectory, whatever that is, is informed mostly by these four at the moment. It’s not bad company to keep.
Anyway, trying to go through all of the Wallerstein in one post would be way too much, and I don’t think I have the wherewithal to do that anyway. What I did want to talk about was something that I’ve been thinking about since I taught a class called Art and Society last year and which has been popping up more and more lately, finally in the Wallerstein, which made me think to write about it.
So, the class I taught last year, I did a fair amount on pranks and the situationists, having the students read some interviews from that first Re/Search issue on pranks and the Situationist Anthology (which is all online here anyway), basically in order to get them to start thinking about whether art actually has power - in a real sense - or if the games artists play are (politically) meaningless. I’m actually rather agnostic on the issue. The things I know about network theory and about complexity and about how the system - meaning in this case, the political system - actually undergoes change, part of me thinks that most of this is just playing around and there’s no actual repercussions. But at the same time, those that put weird stuff into the public sphere start to skew the norm, even if it’s ever so slightly and they create the conditions by which weird stuff that follows them seems less abrasive and is just strange, so if people continue doing these things, maybe reality will become odder and odder. It’s a longshot, but if you look at the ability for weird and silly humor to get into the public eye, 2007 harbors a much more hospitable atmosphere than many of the times past. I mean, Stella, Wonder Showzen, The Mighty Boosh (maybe that’s unfair, as Britain is much more open to this kind of stuff than the US), but the majority of Adult Swim, etc.
So, alright, maybe weird art and media can skew reality in a strange direction. Probably not because these things aren’t in a prominent place of power, but they can move things ever so slightly all the same. The real strange stuff and the stuff that is very politically motivated though usually has to sneak into public consciousness - through public pranks or smuggled in in a kids’ show as Wonder Showzen did. The problem though, and here we’re getting to what I want to talk about, is that the methods and strategies that have been employed in the past to smuggle in these kinds of things are being co-opted themselves by those in power, thus rendering them less potent. For example, the situationist method of detournement, by which public advertisements are changed to reveal a new message.
Banksy is a good contemporary example of this. Take his detourning of the Paris Hilton album:
Well, this kind of strategy has been co-opted through things like viral marketing. In some cases, like when I was in New York last year and I saw chalk outlines on the ground advertising for The Wire, I can maybe get behind them, but in most cases, it’s rather disheartening.
So, one of the things Wallerstein talks about in “Revolutionary Movements in the Era of US Hegemony” - and before I go on I feel I must add a disclaimer. As much as I love this book, I am frankly baffled by Wallerstein’s desire to predict things. One of the first tenets of complexity theory is that there is deterministic unpredictability, i.e., patterns that exist but that don’t repeat and that the farther you get away from the initial conditions of a system, the more unpredictable it gets. There’re reasons in his favor, of course. Wallerstein isn’t explicitly using complexity theory, or at least doesn’t realize he’s using it. It’s both early in his career and early in complexity’s formulation (the book is from 1984), so some excuses may be made, but his insistence on trying to predict the course of world politics as capitalism does its thing in hindsight is a bit bizarre. So, he tries to predict what new political alignments will come into being as the US’s influence fades, hegemonic status moving over to Japan, various alliances are built anew, etc. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t see the end of the USSR which is coming somewhat quickly (from his POV), and therefore can’t see what really did happen. No one could.
So, in this essay, Wallerstein wants to be pro-revolution, or rather, he is pro-revolution (not necessarily violent, what I mean by “revolution” is the dissolution and transformation of the political system into something new - Aufhebung), and is looking at various reasons people have said as to why revolutions have failed in the past. See, Wallerstein believes (at least in this book, I’ve yet to read his later writings, so he may have changed his mind) that a socialist world-economy is possible, but revolutionary forces have to have a long, sustained commitment to social change and must be able to guide the transformation through the crisis-period of capitalism (think of it in Kuhnian terms). I’m rather skeptical that this is a possibility, but I won’t get into that now.
So, Wallerstein is evaluating the critique that the way capitalism works, revolutionary forces and ideas are eventually co-opted - commodified and neutered, rendered harmless because it’s now part of that which it opposed. A dialectical move, but not really the one we want. (”we”, of course, since I figure myself and whomever is really reading this is probably of the same political persuasion).
“In the 1960s an alternative explanation began to be offered. The coming to power of antisystemic movements, far from being their triumph, was a gigantic lure of global corporate liberalism, a mechanism to defang the movements, co-opt their elites, giving them the form but not the substance of victory. the truly dangerous face of America was not that of J.F. Dulles but that of J.F. Kennedy” (138).
I’m ultimately not interested in whether this is why revolutionary movements in the past have failed or not, but rather to point out the insidious nature of this as a by-product of capitalism, that is, it’s not a conspiracy theory or a conscious strategy of the right to get rid of antisystemic movements, but rather a consequence of the need for there to be ever-rising profits, and therefore, the need to colonize every sub-culture, including the ones that oppose capitalism philosophically. Because capitalism is the all-encompassing world-economy and the cost of not operating within its tendrils is high, if not outright dire, eventually everything will be commodified. In one sense, this may be ok, as it hastens the crisis into an outright world-revolution, but my skepticism about that being a good thing is rather high.
When capitalism collapses, the chances that something more benign will take its place is rather small. This isn’t to collapse into outright cynicism, but rather to note that perhaps instead of welcoming a revolution, we should rather delay this total collapse as long as possible.
But I digress. Between viral marketing co-opting detournement and corporate culture co-opting the message of populism (see Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God), I am finding it harder and harder to believe that there is a strategy that will do more than minorly inconvenience those in power, if do anything at all. I mean, opening dialogues with people is a start, and I’m all for surreptitious aesthetic methods that will make actually living life a stranger experience phenomenologically, but beyond the existentialist dedication to a leftist cause merely out of a sense of “this is the right thing to do even if it leads nowhere”, I’m at a loss.
“If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. ’cause that’s all there is.”
(and as much as Joss Whedon’s melodrama pales in comparison these days to things like Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, he really got that existential shit down in Angel)
Huh, I think I’ve made a point. Maybe.
Filed by andyb at September 2nd, 2007 under philosophy
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August 29, 2007
This will be short, just to get the fragments of an idea on the page, but I have some other stuff I need to write later, mostly to get my own ideas together before I teach them tomorrow.
Anyway, a while ago, I was jogging and I started to think about the inextricability of humans-as-natural from humans-as-artificial, or to put it more plainly, who we are can’t be broken down into a two different lists, what is biological about us and what is social about us. The history of this dividing project has been a huge failure so far, just getting more and more muddled. So it’s not a question of nature vs. nurture at all, but rather, what do the complex interactions between the natural and the artificial in certain realms net us? For example, sexuality is neither a purely biological nor a purely social construction, and instead is dependent upon the development of the interactions between the biological and the social. In each case then, it is a contingent story that needs to be told about each person. But on another level, you can’t extract sexuality from a whole host of other factors - religion, geography, genetics, culture, sub-culture, economic class, race, gender, historical period, etc. So, on different levels all these things that the rationalist way of thinking is fond of separating, can’t be separated, and if we’re to figure out how they work together, it’s up to us to take small regions of the picture and examine them in relation to other small regions.
I like to think of it like this. When the early universe formed, the reason we had stars and such form is that there were parts of the universe that were denser than others, that had more primordial particles. The symbolic/cultural is going to be the same way. There are pockets of density among seas of nothingness, and those pockets are important to study, as well as their relation to other pockets.
The relation of levels of complexity to other levels is important too, as the entire system is a feedback mechanism, so one level feeds into the system at one part and can perturb it or it can entrain itself to that part of the system.
The levels can be the complex interactions that make up a single human being’s personality (i.e., a person’s mind), the complex interactions in that person’s family or peer group, political and social life, the sub-culture, neighborhood, region, state, country, world, etc. How each level self-organizes and how each level feeds into the overall global system is important to discern.
Filed by andyb at August 29th, 2007 under philosophy
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August 27, 2007
August 5th, 2007
Some Links
I haven’t been reading enough to warrant writing anything of interest, although I have some thoughts on complexity theory that I’ve been mulling over that might be worth writing about. Anyway, there are some particularly great articles on CounterPunch this weekend that I thought I would link to, if not for anyone else, then my own edification.
The first is Cockburn’s weekend column which discusses Murdoch buying the WSJ and some bits about Hilary and Obama that I thought were interesting.
The second thing was an interview with Chomsky about very Bourdieu-ian themes about how people come to think the things they do and why certain things are never challenged in intellectual cultures such as ours. It’s such a good interview that I think I’ll assign it to my students in the critical thinking class I’m teaching this fall. Chomsky definitely hits on many of the things Bourdieu talks about in books like Outline of a Theory of Practice and Pascalian Meditations, but in a more accessible way.
Filed by andyb at August 27th, 2007 under Uncategorized
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July 20th, 2007
Aneristic Principle
It’s been a night of sensory overload, mostly from watching A Walk Through H, I think one of my favorite Peter Greenaway films. My problem with watching films like this is that they’re so dense and interesting and imaginative that I can’t concentrate on them because they inspire me in my own writing/filmmaking. The same thing happens reading Ben Marcus or etc.
Anyway, let me spend some of this psychic shit I banked from the film - since I merely got one sentence into reworking a short screenplay I was mulling over and have all these pent up braindrakes which must be expelled tout de suite or risk a sleeplessness. Not that that what I have to write is madly original or anything of that nature. I just want to start clarifying some things I wrote in my Colridgean fever last post. Maybe if I spend a little time on each point, it’ll begin to come into focus rather than be a mishmash of halfassed bullshit.
Let me start with another quote from The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I’m roughly halfway through at this point, but let me grab a bit from page 277-8.
” That’s why they hate ordinary mankind - because we’re so disorderly. They’ve been trying for six or seven thousand years to reestablish…law ‘n’ order - The Body Politic, as they like to call it. A giant robot is what their Body Politic really amounts to, you know. A place for everything and everything in its place. A place for everybody and everybody in his place. Look at the Pentagon - look at the whole army, for Goddess’s sake! That’s what they want the planet to be like. Efficient, mechanical, orderly - very orderly - and inhuman. That’s the essence of the Aneristic Delusion: to imagine you have found Order and then to start manipulating the quirky, eccentric chaotic things that really exist into some kind of platoons or phalanxes that correspond to your concepts of the Order they’re supposed to manifest. Of course, the quirkiest, most chaotic things that exist are other people - and that’s why they’re so obsessed with trying to control us.”
(I wish Chuck Dyke had his paper “Clio Meets Chaos: The Movie” online which explains things more intelligently, eloquently and with less swears than I seem able to muster. I muddle on: … )
I started a draft weeks ago that apparently is only saved for a small amount of time and is now lost to history. It was some particularly brilliant shit, so I am saddened by its loss and will mourn the appropriate amount of time over its demise. Let me explain something about analytic philosophy, again, the dominant form of philosophy in this country and England, something I got at in my draft that I’ll try to reconstruct here. The idea of Truth - a dominant “right” way of knowing the world - that started long ago (we like to blame Plato, but so-called Rationality and Reason would have come about as the dominant way of ordering life one way or another…probably. Who the fuck can predict this shit?) - is what gets held up by the academic order, the analytics, most people even, although with a very narrow understanding of what truth is. I remember something Rorty wrote a while ago that I can’t remember where so I can’t quote, but something along the lines of truth being a non-issue so we should just stop talking about it. He only got it partly right, but it’s a good start. So Truth - golden, shiny, sparkly truth that emanates a heavenly light - what is it? Two ends of the spectrum, Absolute Relativity and Absolute Truth (AKA just capital-T Truth) give us both unsatisfactory answers. Because of the carnival shell game of binary false dilemmas that we’re typically fed, one side claims that to give up that side means to head on over all the way to the other choice. There are degrees in-between. Or choices off the map altogether, perhaps, if we begin to think with a little imagination. To say that there is no Truth doesn’t mean that everything is relative. Relativity is just as asinine a position.
Let me further explain. The two tropes of analytic/totalizing understanding(s) of the world are that of reduction/atomism and additivity. This is to say, to understand the world is to reduce it to its constituent parts, analyze each part and then build the world back up again from those constituent parts. If you know how each part works on its own, you just add all that knowledge up together and you have the Truth of the situation. And this is the Truth for all time. Sure things may be thought true at one time, but we figured out that that wasn’t so, and this new understanding is the Truth. Repeat ad nauseam. Ad museum too, although that’s just a pun with no bearing on what I’m saying (typing).
So, the analytic position trusts in the totalized understanding of the world as built up from individual understandings. This assumes though, that things on their own behave as they do on their own when put back into the world. A real easy example of how this isn’t so is a simple social system where the behavior of different actors changes depending on, among many other things, the interrelationships with other actors in the system. But most of the world works like this, and linear approximations of the system, i.e. much of modern science, can work well enough with those approximations. But social systems, I want to contend, at least, are going to go beyond what any legitimately accurate approximation can really capture - and thus, things like philosophy (analytic, at least) since Plato, since the Enlightenment, has been giving us the long con, the payoff being the complete dissociation of it from reality. And we fucking fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
This is not to say that those who practice analytic philosophy are stupid or dupes or deceivers - well, they are in a sense, and I think so much so that it has the ability to be metaphysically damaging - but rather that they are part of a tradition and a social system that awards allegiance to this tradition with things like prestige, money, and tenure. The costs of going outside of this system are too great if you want to make a living off of it, hence you’re either conditioned to buy into the system, through a number of reinforcements that are amplified through mass culture anyway, or you do so cynically to make a living.
Alright, so the totalizing strategy, the strategy that says that everything must be analyzed on its own and then must fit back together again into a perfect understanding is flawed because it misunderstands how things behave when they multiply interact with each other in complex systems, as our world is. This barely scratches the surface, but I’ll expand on it later. So, what if we ricochet to the other end of the spectrum? Well, this is easily dispensed. It’s no better because we’re just replacing one totalizing scheme with infinite totalizing schemes. Everyone has their own way and each way cannot be questioned. Neither of these choices ever seem to feel right on a gut level because they both seem out of touch with how we actually experience the world. On an intellectual level, things really get worse when you start actually examining the consequences of each strategy.
What’s left then is to say, “Fuck it. This shit sucks.” (eloquent). To instead realize the world is a complexly interacting entity that is open to multiple interpretations, but whose ability to be interpreted is historically and socially constrained such that not everything is possible, but rather that there are definite possibilities that have historical trajectories. All of this is easier said than done.
To go back to the quote above, our problem is multiple. On on hand, we have to combat those under the Aneristic Delusion, who keep trying to jam the world into a totalizing theory like a child jamming a square peg into a round hole until in a fit of frustration he chucks the whole thing across the room and goes off to watch TV. (where this analogy ended up, what that means…search me). On the other hand, the task of figuring out these multiple interpretational trajectories, which exist on one scale, and on smaller scales change into different things, and so on and so forth - making the job fractally difficult - is enormous. So what I want to investigate in this blog, complex understandings of social/aesthetic/symbolic systems needs much more explication before we can get anywhere. This is a good start, and at least I explained a bit of my last entry, even if it still is probably obscure.
Filed by andyb at August 27th, 2007 under philosophy
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