World Beat (another plug)

...this time for these guys, "a think tank without walls."

An Antidote to Info Vertigo

Remember 1993? Bill Clinton was sworn in for his first term at the beginning of the year, the Mogadishu debacle took place in October, and the fighting in Bosnia was getting worse. You followed these issues in the newspaper, by radio, or on television. It's not likely you received your news on-line. After all, 1993 was the first year of the World Wide Web. By the end of 1993, there were only 623 websites.

Ah, those were the days. The world was at your fingertips. With Mosaic, the first web browser, you could visit the entire Web in a couple days of intensive mousework.

Now, according to an article I just found through Wikipedia, there are more than 11.5 billion web pages. The Web is reproducing faster than the human population.

Wikipedia itself didn't even exist until five years ago. It now has 1,343,574 articles. Weblogs or blogs began back in 2003. For the past three years, the blogosphere has doubled in size every six months. There are now over 50 million blogs. The verb “to google” debuted not too long ago. OhMyNews, the largest grassroots news service, began in 2000 with 737 citizen reporters. It now has over 41,000 throughout the world.

So, what's the relationship between foreign policy and the tremendous upsurge in information and opinion available on the Web? Traditional media have not disappeared. We still read newspapers and watch the television news. But the foreign policy content in these traditional sources has declined (except for the occasional spikes around war). U.S. media coverage of foreign affairs has declined by as much as 70-80% over the last two decades. Foreign news bureaus are downsizing (or simply shutting down).

That's where the Web comes in. We now have a virtual infinity (a googolplex, to be precise) of sources to learn about the daily slog of war, poverty, and repression. If you don't like The New York Times, you can get your news from hundreds of alternative sources. And if you don't like depressing news, well, you can personalize your news delivery so that you receive Brangelina 24/7.

All of this information is enough to make anyone's head spin. And create a new syndrome: info vertigo. Now everyone can be as time-crunched and info-inundated as the average policymaker.

So, is Foreign Policy In Focus part of the problem or part of the solution? Are we adding richness, nuance, and subtlety to your understanding of foreign policy? Or are we just adding more white noise to the info-barrage you receive on a daily basis?

Let's say that you have the right intentions to read all of the FPIF content, but you simply don't have the time. Then you might like our new feature, 60-Second Expert. You give us 60 seconds and we'll give you 250-word versions of key articles on our site. For instance, check out the talking points version of Stephen Zunes' analysis of the Lebanon ceasefire. You don't have to be a busy policymaker to take advantage of this new service.

Don't worry: this is not FPIF Lite. We will still provide you with in-depth analysis of the stories behind the headlines. This week, for instance, you can read FPIF analyst Saul Landau's piece on U.S. misperceptions of Cuba, which appeared at TomPaine. We have Ariela Ruiz Caro's contribution to Americas Program on U.S. trade pressure on Latin America. And there are two pieces from Right Web, one on Elliott Abrams and the other on Hezbollah.

Unapologetic blockquote, revisiting Adorno ("..." and "...." mine)

Adorno (sounding, for all the world, very much like JD, all jabbings at phenomenology, French philo and literary studies notwithstanding):

For it is mere superstition on the part of a science that operates by processing raw materials to think that concepts as such are unspecified and become determinate only when defined. Science needs the notion of the concept as a tabula rasa to consolidate its claim to authority, its claim to be the sole power to occupy the head of the table. In actuality, all concepts are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand. The essay starts with these meanings, and...takes them farther; it wants to help language in its relation to concepts, to take them in reflection...Unapologetically it lays itself open to the objection that one does not know for sure how one is to understand its concepts. For it understands that the demand for strict definition has long served to eliminate–through stipulative manipulations of the meanings of concepts–the irritating and dangerous aspects of the things that live in the concepts. But the essay does not make do without general concepts–even language that does not fetishize concepts cannot do without them–nor does it deal with them arbitrarily. Hence it takes presentation more seriously than do modes of proceeding that separate method and object and are indifferent to the presentation of their objectified contents. The manner of expression is to salvage the precision sacrificed when definition is omitted, without betraying the subject matter to the arbitrariness of conceptual meanings decreed once and for all. In this, Benjamin was the unsurpassed master. This kind of precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less but more than a definitional procedure, the essay presses for the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In such experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations. Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture. The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it...

The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in school. Such a person will read without a dictionary. If he sees the same word thirty times in continually changing contexts, he will have ascertained its meaning better than if he had looked up all the meanings listed, which are usually too narrow in relation to the changes that occur with changing contexts and too vague in relation to the unmistakable nuances that the context gives rise to in every individual case. This kind of learning remains vulnerable to error, as does the essay as form; it has to pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience with a lack of security that the norm of established thought fears like death. It is not so much that the essay neglects indubitable certainty as that it abrogates it as an ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, not in a treasure-hunting obsession with foundations. Its concepts receive their light from a terminus ad quem hidden from the essay itself, not from any obvious terminus a quo, and in this the method itself expresses its utopian intention....

The more it strives to consolidate itself as theory and to act as though it held the philosopher's stone in its hands, the more intellectual experience courts disaster. At the same time, by its very nature intellectual experience strives for such objectification. This antimony is reflected in the essay....

Rhetoric was probably never anything but thought in its adaptation to communicative langauge. Such thought aimed at something unmediated: the vicarious gratification of the listeners. The essay retains, precisely in the autonomy of its presentation, which distinguishes it from scientific and scholarly information, traces of the communicative element such information dispenses with...

The essay uses equivocations not out of sloppiness, nor in ignorance of the scientific ban on them, but to make it clear–something the critique of equivocation, which merely separates meanings, seldom succeeds in doing–that when a word covers different things they are not completely different; the unity of the word calls to mind a unity, however hidden, in the object itself. This unity, however, should not be mistaken for linguistic affinity, as is the practice of contemporary restorationist philosophies. Here too the essay approaches the logic of music, that stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition, in order to appropriate for verbal language something it forfeited under the domination of discursive logic–although that logic cannot be set aside but only outwitted within its own forms by dint of incisive subjective expression...(emphasis added)

-from Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

nb: The Long Sunday symposium on Spivak, perhaps also of related interest–being one of several things that prompted this.

naked plug

Dear Friends,
Naked Punch is currently looking for collaborations for two different cultural projects; details below. Please distribute this email to anyone you think might be interested.

Specific Projects - Call for Proposals

Please get in touch with Lorenzo Marsili (l.marsili (AT) nakedpunch.com) for further details on the projects below

1) Independent Cultural Realities Symposium.

Naked Punch is currently organising, as part of the Festival of Europe, a one-day symposium with the participation of representatives of numerous independent cultural and artistic collectives.
Talks will explore the concept of avant-garde, and the significance of collective independence in cultural experimentation. Each organisation will also be asked to contribute with a small work of art to a collective exhibition that will be shown during the Festival in London. Details will soon be added.

2) Naked Punch International Desks Series

Naked Punch is currently looking for individuals interested in taking part in a photographic project. We are looking to accumulate a large number of quasi-surreal photographs presenting a "desk" of naked punch in the most unthinkable places imaginable. Desks (a "foreign desk" is also the name of an office of the magazine abroad) can be decorated with the photographer's personal understanding of naked punch, or as he/she wishes. Example of locations include subway stations, forests, street crossings, islands, etc.

The photographs received will be presented on the website, and exhibited at one of the naked punch events in London.

Let me also use the occasion to announce that the new issue of naked punch will be out in late September, featuring a special on Latin American politics, a Dossier on contemporary art in Lebanon, interviews with Ernesto Laclau and Gayatry Spivak, and more. Why not easily subscribe from our website, receive the copy to your doorsteps, and help our independent collective?

No, I really cannot see why not.

Tristan Tzara

on behalf of naked punch collective

www.nakedpunch.com

between citation and accusation

Where to draw the line? There can be no pure formula. But one way of approaching this question arose recently in the course of a discussion with Ellis Sharp (see his reply to my reply). My argument, such as it was, was of the sort wishing primarily to raise questions about the way Markson's This is Not a Novel–for lack of a better word– argued. That is, how seriously are we to take it? Markson sure seems to be citing an awful lot, and citing cocktail gossip-type nuggets of information, bits and pieces and shards of what is often called "autobiographical" reference, with cavalier concern for accuracy or the fullness of the truth at best. Of course, such "not-novel" would lose something crucial were it entirely fabricated (instead of a performative and self-returning and self-referring emptying of the head, it would perhaps only be the emptying of an empty head). Accuracy matters, surely. And giving free circulation to slander of the worst, most pernicious sort is no small matter, either. But I still wonder if Markson (that is, personally) may in some sense be forgiven for citing here, or rather for having his "Writer" cite what is, whether justly or not, still cocktail knowledge of the generally accepted sort. Which maybe raises another question: where does the recourse to irony fall short?

nb. On another, admittedly more interesting note, on Genet and frenemies, please see one and two by Angela.

Lebanon's Exxon Valdez

Here, and everywhere.


How does Bush sleep at night. Maybe he dreams there is someone in charge, someone very powerful with a plan a, plan b and c. How comforting for him.

Elsewhere in the world:

The topsoil has been removed from some front yards in an attempt to clean up the oil, but black bubbles are already seeping back up through the ground.

Right then.

Critical distance

Following on from here...

"So if we want to be guided by Lenin’s reply to Luxemburg on the National Question, we should support Hizbollah or the Iraqi resistance insofar as they resist the oppressor, but when they stand for their own bourgeois nationalism, we should oppose them. Have I got it right?

Leaving aside the dubiousness of calling Hizbollah (whose name means “God’s Party") bourgeois nationalists, I suggest the following imaginary scene:

'Good news, comrade! George Galloway, even the same which slew the mighty Hitchens, has declared himself for our cause--and if that were not sufficient reason to rejoice, the Monthly Review online site has done so as well!'

'Good news indeed, my brother! I had almost lost heart and determined to surrender to the Zionist enemy, but now my courage is restored. Yet stay: is their support absolutely unequivocal?'

'Indeed it is not. Should we fall into the error of bourgeois nationalism, we will incur their opposition.'

'Say not so! Let us then subject our theory and our practice alike to self-criticism on the lines suggested by immortal Lenin, lest we lose through political error that invaluable support which our valiant resistance ha[th] but lately won!'
Posted by rootlesscosmo on 08/09 at 02:17 PM

not bored

A review of the new Blanchot book, and another of The Philosophy of Boredorm (many thanks to Alfredo).

Proud member of the...something community

Umberto Eco in the Guardian explores two theories giving a whole new meaning to "the outside:"

There are two hollow earth theories. According to the first one we live on the crust, but there is another world on the inside where lies - some say - the realm of Agartha, the home of the King of the World (see, for example, the fantasies of French philosopher René Guénon). The second theory has it that while we think we live on the outer crust, we actually live in the interior (on a convex surface instead of a concave one)[...]

It is widely rumoured on the internet that the hollow earth theory was taken seriously by top-ranking Nazis who believed in the occult sciences. In some circles of the German navy it was purportedly believed that the hollow earth theory would make it easier to pinpoint the exact position of British ships because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation.

Hitler allegedly sent an expedition to the Baltic island of Rügen where a Dr Heinz Fischer trained a telescopic camera toward the sky in order to spot the British fleet sailing on the interior of the convex surface of the hollow earth. It is even said that some V1 missiles went astray because their trajectory was calculated on the basis of a hypothetical concave surface instead of a convex one.

I don't know. Maybe someone can explain it to me. Via PTDR.

bleg pas

I don't normally ask this, but if you are at all so inclined, please consider making a donation. Thanks so much. There's a donation button right over on the sidebar, there (and some advertisements too). Times are hard. As everybody knows.

nb. For a donation of $25 or more, the first two people may receive a free copy, shipped by yours truly, of Naked Punch Magazine's latest special issue on China Issue 06 + Spring 2006, if so desired.

On the inevitable capitalist drooling over Cuba

Specifically here, just shameless. Not a single courageous or appreciative word about what makes this country, its people and its complicated history and yes, its sometimes homophobic leader with his humble, humanity-asserting beard that children sometimes tug on, so unique and truly wonderful, despite hardship (and no doubt more to come). (Speaking as someone whose friends and neighbors go down there regularly, to deliver parts and work on cars, or to work on environmental issues, you know, somewhere the government actually cares.)

Update: a little better. And from The Rhine River.

Update 2: And more:

First of all, poor as their nation may be, Cubans actually live quite well compared with neighboring capitalist countries in the Caribbean or Central America. And, speaking as someone who’s made scores of trips to the island since the 1960s, I can tell you that Cuba looks poorer and more dilapidated than it is. Buildings need paint, but its 13 medical schools and 13 universities turn out well-prepared citizens; its applauded healthcare system claims an infant mortality rate lower than that of Washington, D.C.

Cubans who listen to Miami radio or Radio Marti (Voice of America) know of George Bush’s disinclination to spend money on public service, an attitude very unlike that of Castro’s government. And if U.S.-style capitalism should return to Cuba, many on the island know they would have to start paying for medical services and education that they now receive gratis.

Further, should the floodgates to America open, many islanders believe that the influx of land-hungry Miami-based Cubans will result in their losing title to their homes or having to pay exorbitant rents as their parents and grandparents did in the pre-revolutionary era.

Right now, for better or worse, many Cubans have a very laissez faire attitude toward work and official responsibilities. It’s not hard for them to imagine how difficult and grating their lives might become once their labor goes toward enriching a true parasite class...

There’s little chance that Bush will succeed in re-colonizing the island. That much seems assured, at least with Raul in power. But Raul and his successors appear to lack the outside-the-box thinking that would inject new life into the Cuban experiment. And that is what is sorely needed. Cuba’s citizens have endured their share of hard knocks over the last 40 years—nuclear brinkmanship with the U.S., a strangling embargo, and the absence of many freedoms – all without revolting, mind you.

They deserve the right to participate in the policies that guide their nation. They have earned that much by now. Perhaps Raul’s very lack of charisma—and his advanced age—is just what Cuba needs: breathing room for a populist-driven reinvigoration of the revolutionary spirit that Fidel once sparked. But this time, the revolution would draw its energy not just from one man, but rather from all Cubans.

It would put renewed meaning, at least, into Castro’s slogan, Patria o muerte.

...and more (both well worth reading, both via wood s lot).

Of auto-biography and literary thieves

The notion of Italian 'weak thought' has been an interest of mine, if largely unspoken, for some time now. It has also occured to me over the last few years that there is a parallel to be made, between what this 'weak thought' has come to signify, and recent trends in literature.  This is, admittedly, not the most original or precise thought, but it is a thought I have sometimes had, nonetheless. Likely both the good and the bad forms of New Confessionalism owe a debt of some sort to the Italians.

On another note, Ellis Sharp wonders what percentage of This is Not a Novel is straight-up erroneous. I would wager between 10-15% but frankly, do not care. It's not like the pleasure of reading this (not)novel stems from expanding one's bibliographical, oracular authority beyond the coctail soundbite or the gossip-quality of exotic reference–one might even say their constant and simultaneous trivialization and elevation to narrative norm is no small part of the point (about which more in a minute).

Still, the (not)novel frustrates me too, both at a surface annoyance level and for reasons perhaps best expressed by others. But also because it eludes classification and casual dismissal, for instance as mere form of mechanical repetition or photocopying, or mental masturbation. There is an art to David Markson's (not)novels, not least of all an extraordinary tenderness and humor, and not only in the presence of playful juxtaposition but more significantly as the heroic element of writing, even in soundbites and anecdotes and borrowed words, inevitably comes through. It reveals itself through thematic repetition, surely, but also in constant interruption, and in the subtlety of persisting in what might be called, for lack of a better phrase, the silent questioning that lies at the heart of 'literature' itself: as Blanchot speaking of Foucault might have said, the miracle and madness of "I speak." But also, why care?

Ellis wishes to set the record straight about Jean Genet's alleged Nazi collaboration (having arrived at this word, Ellis may not appear to have much interest in exploring what it might have meant in Genet's specific context–or indeed why the rumor may have any legs at all–but that aside). I had always thought something of the sort was at least half-self-acknowledged (for instance in Funeral Rites), but I have to trust Ellis's knowledge of the latest biography, I suppose. I certainly don't mean to trivialize it, of course, but in the context of Markson's novel it does seem an accusation operating rather already on the plain of common (coctail) knowledge (that is to say, also, in the absence of argument or linear narrativity, in Markson's hands, on the plain of what may still resist, or defer simplistic judgement). It is at least familiar gossip, taking part in the currency of what is common (if commonly erroneous) enough. For instance, just the other day:

"Him too? Jean Genet, saint and martyr for an entire epoch, was also a Nazi?" asks Jürg Altwegg, reviewing Ivan Jablonka's biographical study "Les vérités inavouables de Jean Genet" (Seuil). In the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre elevated the French dramatist to "Saint Genet, actor and martyr". Later, Michel Foucault saw in Genet the figure of a lunatic and criminal created in the mould of inhuman institutions. Jacques Derrida, for his part, exalted Genet's "subversive instinct". Now this myth is being subverted. "Jablonka's study reveals that Genet's legends and lies are at least partially rooted in the Second World War. Before chanting hymns to Palestinian terrorists and the Baader Meinhof Gang, Genet had sung praises of Hitler and the Nazis no less enthusiastically than Louis Ferdinand Céline. Genet was the lover of a French SS officer. He raved about 'blonde warriors' and praised the massacre at Oradour as pure 'poetry'. For Jablonka, Genet's Nazi leanings were the result of an 'intellectual and erotic fascination'. He did not expect anything good from Hitler, he was just delighted by all the horror."

If we are to believe that every act of writing contains en element of auto-biography, including Funeral Rites and This is Not a Novel, then it is perhaps ironic that on the last page the (non)protagonist who has come to be known, like Nabokov's butterflies, as simply "Writer" announces, in a moment that seems marked by both a sort of preemptive blackmail and poignant directness: "Writer's cancer....Farewell and be kind."

And with that the reader, always, in principle, just (democratic?) anyone, (Hugh Person...Hello Hugh) is thereby encouraged to begin, the endless task, not quite thinking and somewhat less than entirely self-assured, yet again.

Great moments in communication...

Note to spam-bots: your comments will not be approved. It only takes me a second to delete them by the hundreds. Don't waste your time. Really.

On 7/30/06, subfor subforini [subfor@gmail.com] wrote:

Dear pasaudela.blogspot.com admin,
There are a few purposes of writting to You. I am very interested in Your blog pasaudela.blogspot.com address. I want to ask You to concede Your pasaudela.blogspot.com blog address. ''Why do I ask Your pasaudela.blogspot.com address?'' - because I am going to build one site(about cars) on Your blog's address. This site will be quite popular with about 10, 000 unique visitors from USA per day (I know, because I found one niche in the Internet and in order to make use of it I very need pasaudela.blogspot.com address). What benefit will You get after You concede me Your pasaudela.blogspot.com address? - in my new site I would insert an advertisement of Your site(whatever You want) plus in a new site on Your old address I could write something like this: ''The old site moved to your-new-address.com. The new site is about cars''. Therefore You will get about 100-200 new unique visitors to Your site per day from Yours advertisement at new site plus You don't lose Your old visitors. So, I plead You, concede pasaudela.blogspot.com address to me(just address, not the blog) to make absolute use of it.In addition, for conceded Your blog address You will get domain name ending with .com, .net , .org, .info, .biz for free for Your new blog address(for example www.Your-site-address.com). I see that Your site haven't many visitors, so I could help You.

For more information send me an e-mail to subfor@gmail.com .
Waiting for Your answer (please answer me, suggest Your rules, just say ''NO'', if You are not interested, but closely think, because I win but You win too).

Thank You for Your understanding and time.
Yours faithfully, Subfor Subforini



From: Matt
To: subfor subforini [subfor@gmail.com]

Go fuck yourself.



From: subfor subforini [subfor@gmail.com]
To: Matt

You too!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Image courtesy of BLDGBLOG; see here.)

rich get richer, & little-c-communism, the désoeuvrement of music, cont.

Here...(and out of sight)...

Incidentally, if you haven't been digesting these radio shows yet, well you should be (the latest one being, "Rich Man, Poor Man").

(The forthcoming album, it seems, will provide a bit of balance to the older stuff. Update: leaked samples here. For a good bootleg summer concert, meanwhile, this decade (his best yet, as far as I'm concerned), you might see here.

In other tangentially related news, Thom Yorke is apparently going solo. Not sure I feel much of anything about that one, to be honest. But, you know.)

Why do We Like Music?:

...Most of the "uses" of music mentioned in this article–learning about time, fitting things together, getting along with others, and suppressing one's troubles–are very "functional, but overlook much larger scales of "use." Curtis Roads remarked that, "Every world above bare survival is self constructed; whole cultures are built around common things people come to appreciate." These appreciations, represented by aesthetic agents, play roles in more and more of our decisions: what we think is beautiful gets linked to what we think is important. Perhaps, Roads suggests, when groups of mind-agents cannot agree, they tend to cede decisions to those others more concerned with what, for better or for worse, we call aesthetic form and fitness. By having small effects at many little points, those cumulative preferences for taste and form can shape a world.

That is another reason why we say we like the music we like. Liking is the way certain mind-parts make the others learn the things they need to understand that music. Hence liking—and its relatives—lies at the very heart of understanding what we hear. 'Affect' and 'aesthetic' do not lie in other academic worlds that music theories safely can ignore. Those other worlds are academic self-deceptions that we use to make each theorist's problem seem like someone else's.

Thanks be.

Shivering lives: in need of heroic readers (more than heroes)

xp@LS

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

Some  readers may have already seen Benjamin Kunkel's essay  in the Sunday Book Review (bugmenot), in which he writes, among other things:

What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health.  His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.  Thoreau isn't against self-esteem (he admires a friend who has learned to "treat himself with ever increasing respect"); but his main task is to lose his esteem for society in which "trade curses everything it handles" and the singular natural resource of time is wasted in barren productivity.  Maybe he had vices out there in the woods, but that's not his concern, or ours.  The overwhelming impression is of his philosophical ardor, which he tries to fuse with his practical ardor.  There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia.  And why did he quit his cabin in the end?  "It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live."   This accent of futurity is missing among contemporary memoirists.  They sigh over their past woes; sigh with relief now that they're better; or sigh the long sighs of nostalgia. (emphasis added)

Indeed, and not just among contemporary memoirists, but also American Presidents.

Anyway, I would like to concur, alongside Marco Roth, that in the current marketplace of literature's ongoing infantilization the legacy of the "heroic reader" may be something we can not afford to let alone.

The paradox of the heroic reader would seem to be, quite simply, that she must actively distance herself from the sick world (that is, submerge herself in the very limitless task, in the important and non-trivial stakes of reading, with all the terror this implies), in order to re-enter society with both sincerity and sympathy, and with an attention–dare we call it philosophical–to living (zoe) as opposed to mere endurance of the "safe" thrills of organized spectacle or pre-packaged experience.

Surely it is no exaggeration to imply, as Roth does, that overbrimming with "fresh talent" today that all looks the same (literally, with the same attractive author photo in the back of each new novel), literature and its would-be critics have lost sight of something crucial in "succumb[ing] to triumphal capitalism."  Increasingly light and harmless, overbrimming with clichés masquerading as novelty, or with pat and wildly simplistic explanatory formulas seemingly designed to grant the overworked Starbucks citizen access to a freshly flatte(n)(r)ing worldview, merely updated for the latest toys or accessories to self, you might say, (or in this case, conversation soundbites), and without posing a threat to either complicity or complacency, or for that matter challenging her critical and independent intelligence as literate, world citizen...even the new "seriousness" today remains–in short–philosophically impoverished.

This is not to suggest that philosophy and the "heroic reader" are purely synonymous, obviously.  But for a while the literary critic, and lit theory in particular (if one goes back and actually reads it now, as one site where philosophy had temporarily sedimented)–did keep alive and remain faithful to this utopian impulse.  Here is Roth (subscription only):

We live in a cloud of vague dangers, neither clear nor present.  Unelected judges appoint our president, and a man in a suit (once a Greenspan, now a Bernanke) determines whether stocks, prices, and unemployment rates rise or fall.  Consent is all that is asked of us, or suspension of disbelief.  And it seems that our ever increasing supply of fictions does nothing but abet the cultivation of this decadent passivity, and idealogical apparatus all the more insidious for not belonging to the state.

This criticism of readers is as old as prophetic castigations of idol worshippers.  The concern has usually been that reading will lead to wrong actions or no action–to immorality or passivity.  So Wordsworth thought that the surge in popular novels and plays at the beginning of the industrial revolution had plunged English minds into "savage torpor."  He recommended we read more to cure ourselves–more Wordsworth.  Novelists too wrote against the wrong kind of novels and the wrong kind of readers.  This remains one of the strongests unsettled legacies of the long tradition of the modern novel, from the era of the French revolution, through Flaubert and Tolstoy, up through today.

The rescue of readers from their own pernicious tendencies must be counted among the many utopian projects of the past two centuries, and, like nationalism and communism, it gained an accelerated force at the beginning of the 20th.  The the evident aesthetic and political failures of socialist realism onward, novelists, critics and teachers have stuggled to create readers whose aesthetic sensibilities would trigger their social responsibility and, if lucky, their mental liberation.  Sometimes readers were to be dragged out of their everyday slough by an array of estrangement effects.  At others, they would find freedom and enlightenment through an understanding of the arbitrary nature of conventions governing language and narrative action.  The rise of "literary theory" was aligned with these utopian hopes and movements.  Looking back now, we can see the 20th century as the golden age of the reader as hero.

Where did this figure go?  Like so much else, the heroic reader has succumbed to triumphal capitalism.  We look around and find that we are in a consumer's world.  Even those who supposedly "care" for literature have turned themselves into fans and enthusiasts.  Does such and such a novel keep it real?  Does it pique curiosity?  Do I identify?  Do I like the sound of this voice in my ear?  The idea of the reader as canny consumer is so pervasive that one editor of a prominent literary magazine writes about herself as a member of "the service economy" and compares criticism to waitressing.  It was undoubtedly a moment of weakness.  But still:  is a taste for literature nothing more than a refined palate?  Is literary criticism really like being able to tell which wine tastes of wet stone and which of tart blackberry?

Banished by Amazon preferences and litblogs, the heroic reader lingers on as a memory mostly confined to academic criticism.  Pick up the lit theory of the late 1960s and early '70s:  There's Stanley Fish's vision of Paradise Lost as great test and trap for its Protestant readers; Frederic Jameson's liberation theology, in which readers bring the political unconscious of novels into the light of day; the stoical struggle of Paul de Man's "rhetorical" reading, in which the self must learn to deny that it is a self; and, most self-consciously heroic of all, Harold Bloom's quest to arrive back at "the great cyclic poem" by imagining poets as the best and most active unconscious misreaders.  It makes sense that academic literary criticism would carry a torch for "higher reading," since these people have devoted themselves to the belief that reading is the most important thing we do.

Of course these theories never made it into broader American culture.  (There was once a plan to have Andrzej Warminski, Gayatri Spivak, and a team of graduate students teach rhetorical reading in New Haven public schools, but it's not mentioned now without an embarrassed laugh.)  For a while, however, there were two complementary "heroic reader" theories that did make it.  These weren't necessarily the most rigorous or the most captivatingly "heroic," but they were the most directly American.  They offered a sense of reading that tallied with ideas of what it means to be a good citizen in a liberal democracy.  One proposed to enlarge our sympathies; the second would teach us how to overcome our own Romantic impulses and reach emotional and intellectual maturity.

The first theory was once an axiom of liberal-arts education back when we had liberal-arts education:  reading novels could be "good for you"; it could even improve American morals.  You didn't learn anything from novels exactly, not useful knowledge, not information necessarily, certainly not the Truth, but the right kinds of novels were supposed to act as a check on our freedom and selfishness by educating readers into sympathy with others.  There was always something horrifying and terrifyingly banal about this assumption.  Horrifying because it tried to socialize the wild imagination of readers–especially those young readers most likely to experience literature as liberation from the limitations of place, time, social codes, their own gender, race, and class, their families, or morality itself.  Terrifyingly banal because once you'd learned to read the educated way, a lot of the illicit thrill went out of reading novels.  The novel just wanted you to behave.  There's an analogy with the present cult of diet and exercise:  the boy who runs through the grass until his lungs burn and the world looks both brighter and darker becomes a calorie counter and times himself in the mile.

The most thorough defenses of what David Bromwich nicknamed "literature as moral vitamins" appeared on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time that can now be seen as the death throes of American liberalism and the liberal arts.  (Then, it was thought of as a mere crisis period; the enemies were presumed to be the antiliberal left and French theory, rather than fundamentalists, demagogues, and rampant consumerism.)  Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum both attempted to make the case for reading novels as socially desirable and even necessary activity for a society that would be both good and just.  For Rorty, the relation of reader to novel and also of author to character demonstrated the kind of solidarity that could hold secular and democratic countries together even if we accepted that truth was unknowable, shot through with irony and contingency.  Nussbaum thought novels could offer revisions to liberal utilitarian calculations.  They would rehumanize a technocratic elite and teach them to account for exceptions to teh sort of generalized rule-making that prevailed among professional ethicists and lawyers.  Not just any novel would do, of course.  A canon was available and it appeared to be a closed one:  adapted, with variations, from F.R. Leavis's older "Great Tradition," it often sounded like Austen, some Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James.  Instead of Leavis's favorite, D.H. Lawrence, Rorty substituted Nabokov and Orwell; Nussbaum offered Beckett and also stepped back to Shakespeare and the ancient Athenians.  One because an ethical reader, in short, by reading ethical writers–writers devoted to the task of creating charactgers who were, as much as possible, autonomous.

Despite this late attempt to rescue the liberal view that, in John Dewey's phrase, "art is more moral than moralities," the model already had encountered serious opposition.  Crucially, it bred a feeling of superiority among novel-reading liberal-arts types that had first been exposed during the '60s revolt of the antiliberal left.  It turned out that characters who existed in novels as objects of sympathy (put-upon women, poor people, colonial subjects, prisoners) had ideas of their own about life.  They didn't want sympathy, they wanted power.  And so, at the high school level, the whole post-1968 model of reading for group empowerment and identiy formation supplanted the cult of sympathy and developed into niche marketing (chick lit, anyone?).  On the political level, the short-lived triumph of minority politics was followed by the long counter-revolution in whose shadow we've spent our lives.  One of its major triumphs has been the careful corruption of minority "Yes We Can!" rhetoric of empowerment into an excuse for majority bullying.  Liberals are now told that corporate bosses, policemen, and politicians have feelings that must be respected; that we must care for the strike-breaker, the prison guard, and the executive's wish for privacy.  To do anything else would be elitist.

But would it be uncivilized?  Becoming a responsible citizen and even an adult is precisely about knowing when to judge and condemn and when to sympathize and care.  Yet how does one know that is real, what romantic?  What a true judgement and what an act of faith or misplaced trust?  To try to answer these questions, the second type of American heroic reader was called forth in the aftermath of World War II amid a host of European influences.  In his 1948 essay "Art and Fortune," Lionel Trilling argued that we needed novels to make us feel fully alive; he proposed that we read novels precisely in order to re-experience a developmental process and win our way to full adulthood.  The aim was to achieve knowledge without loss of power, but with a recognition of limitations.

The right new novels in the hands of the right new readers could bring about a change, a synthesis in the ongoing "dialectic of reality and illusion."  In Trilling's account, the novel that best staged this multi-layered dialectic between worldly and literary experience was Stendhal's early-19th century "novel of ideas," The Red and the Black.  In the character and fate of Julien Sorel, Trilling saw the heroic readers of the future as well as hope for novesl.

For Trilling, when Julien borrows a gardener's ladder to climb into the bedroom of his boss's daughter, with a pistol in his pocket and a knife, pirate-style, between his teeth, he rises to the level of a novelistic objective correlative.  Within a single action, Stendhal captures the farcical elements of Liberal France in the 1830s, a culture in which a young man's dream of romantic heroism had been degraded to one of upward mobility.  Julien isn't just an idea himself; however, later in the novel, as Trilling reads it, he becomes exactly the adult enlightened reader who learns to recognize his past actions as misguided–motivated by the pursuit of "specious goods."  Julien, though, doesn't quite make it.  (He gets bored of the aristocratic girlfriend he's seduced, but he never manages to figure out what he wants.)  And that failure too is a parable.

This kind of reading, let's call it allegorical transumption, depends on the reader's will to pass through identification into interpretation; call it a will to grow up.  This reader–while we're at is, let's call him he–with his novel (and friends to argue about it) would be allowed fantasies of seductions, rope-ladders, murders, strapping men, and women "inall ways shapely"–the trappings of old romances endlessly updatable for new situations.  But he would also have to understand that these demons must be sublimated into thoughts and arguments about the state of the world and the condition of his life.  By plunging into the lives of fictional others will all reckless abandon, he'd yet emerge clutching a pearl of greater price, a fuller understanding of himself, his motives and wishes.  He'd do this not necessarily to act on them, but to bring them to light and expose them to a world shared with others.

Both the will to interpret and the will to grow up flagged in the '60s, epitomized by Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" and its argument for endless surface textual pleasure.  Sontag's call for an "erotics of art" anticipated and echoed sexual liberation's promise of eternal youth as well as the growing suspicion of psychoanalysis.  Yet, against Sontag, we can once more recognized hermeneutics as a kind of erotics, albeit more Civilization and Its Discontents than "zipless fuck."

Despite our culture's best efforts–from left and right–the liberal hero-readers of both the "moral vitamins" and "allegorical transumption" accounts can never be fully liquidated–even when History itself seems to have no more use for them.  They've been driven underground in a curious inverted repressed, but they may return as characters again.  No character returns unchanged from the underworld or from exile.  We shouldn't expect our new heroic readers to be as innocent in their quests for spiritual upward mobility as their many precursors.  The liberal hero is different from Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Don Quixote–those overly active readers betrayed into becoming characters in someone else's novel–but there's still a story to tell.

A contemporary novel that could dramatize the life of one heroic reading consciousness or even one reader's struggle between heroic reading and the impulses so effectively tapped by consumerism might just be the sort of novel to save us from our own savage torpor.  It would still be a novel, of course–just as Anna Karenina remains a novel critical of novels and already points the way to Tolstoy's ultimate renunciation of art.  The struggle would have to be set in one of the great metropolitan centers of our global commercial culture, New York or London.  Curiously, it seems difficult to write anything but minor novels and satires about these places now.  It used to be that the metropole was defined as the place everyone went to write and the plave everyone wrote about.  The former still holds, for the most part, but the metropolis now lies shrouded in myths of its boringness, its unrepresentability.  The inhabitants of these places who want the news from novels get "realist" writing purchased from developing countries or America's expanding borderlands and hinterlands.  We metropolitan readers have lives no less reall for taking place withing this history of reading.  Let us turn the gaze upon ourselves, if only the better to focus it again.

So then, not a call for yet another Great American Novel, exactly, but a demand to write conscious of history, nonetheless.  It is indeed an antiquated and perhaps "terrifyingly banal" assumption (not to mention, somewhat residually patronising and patriarchal), that literature may provide not only more than a business, more than a merely "safe and fun" activitity (on airplanes, say), but also equipment for living.  But is throwing out this legacy (call it "Theory," or call it both T.S. Eliot and Derrida, or call it Nussbaum and Trilling), really the only possible, wisest response to (American) liberalism's demise?  What might still be worth retaining, in its commitment to openness and a certain sense of futurity, especially, not to mention courage....It is, I think, an entirely appropriate and prudent question.

another stupid political post

You know the tides are swirling thick when even bedrock loser like William F. Buckley makes an opportunist splash, noting how poorly it reflects on Bush's character and all, that he has not yet voluntarily resigned.

Right, because thinking people the world over had always pegged Bush the next George Washington. It's only been that long.

Funny also, how F. Buckley is now referenced as some old and noble figure of integrity, calloused and wayward yet refined dignitary of some thing (from back when "conservatives" were not all pea-brained, "Jesus"-loving, bat-shit crazies). In truth the man was a complete fucking prick, a nasty and annoying snob with a truly vicious and cruel dominating side, not least of all when it came to those many decent and free-thinking professors he tried, relentlessly and unapologetically, to smear into oblivion and financial ruin, as either gay or "communist" (or both), back in the day.

(Most likely now he simply feels–like many Eastern conservatives–left out of the loop. The ruling fundamentalist junta of Texans and Exxon crooks probably ignores him.)

Parrhesia

On this vain blog, it is a series; in the world that is the case, it is another sign of hope. From the editors' intruduction to the inaugural issue (via via):

‘Parrhesia’, as Foucault explains it, is a word which comes into prominent use in the democratic moment of the classical age. It is used first extensively by Euripedes in the second half of the fifth century, before it comes to occupy a more central place – and to become a hotly contested issue or possibility – in the political texts of the period (‘Fearless Speech’, pp. 78-83), and the philosophies of Plato (pp. 83-86, 91-107), Aristotle (pp..86-7), and the later Hellenistic period. (107ff.)
The topic of parrhesia which occupies Foucault’s last works on parrhesia, we would argue, has an incredible ‘timeliness’ for us today, in a world where our leaders talk about spreading democracy abroad while, to all appearances, it is increasingly questioned an curtailed at home, hemmed in by both legal changes and the emergence of new forms of populism and what Isocrates would have called kolakes (‘flatterers’). (p. 82, see pp.13-4) The issues surrounding the cassus bellum in Iraq, the unprecedented secrecy of today’s US administration or its increasingly public advocacy of torture, and (in Australia) the litany of causes celebres from the children overboard to the AWB, have raised the issue of the relation between truth-telling and politics with all the freshness with which it evidently presented itself to Isocrates, Plato, or the pseudo-Xenephon.

We see here a parallel with the work of Walter Benjamin. Like Foucault, Benjamin’s body of thought was devoted to the necessity of thinking the past through the crisis of the present. Benjamin was however concerned with the ways in which history consistently obliterated those moments and movements who thought of the possibility of utopian futures. As he stated in one of his earliest published works “The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies but are deeply rooted in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated and ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind.” For Benjamin true critical thought wasn’t the product of the institution, a sanctioned reflection on the present. Excoriated it is thought that is constantly threatened and challenged as its seeks to uncover new truths, emerging out of a specific context, but searching for the possibility of shattering the petrified continuum of the present.

In essence, this journal takes as its aim the elaboration of the many problems that rest upon this self-context relation in the sense that Foucault analyses it. We are not here concerned with ‘telling the truth’ in the mode of the classical thinker, that is, as the members of our culture whose fortune or birthright it is to claim objectivity in judgement. In fact, as Foucault himself indicated so thoroughly, this position of objectivity is itself a matter for examination – Jacques Rancière’s article in this first edition engages with the same concern. We are concerned to examine the forms and problems of the various modalities of relationship. One consequence of this is that aesthetics can no longer be considered a well-demarcated discourse concerned with art narrowly conceived.

Subjectivity, not given but a part of the movement of socio-political contexts, is itself to be composed. In a similar vein, ethics loses its sense as the discourse of inalienable rights, or of moral codes, but must instead express the various modes interaction with oneself and one’s context. Again, politics must be understood no longer as the analytic of society, but must be broadened to include the various modes of individuation, subjectivation and counter-subjectivation.

The broadest goals of Parrhesia are to pursue the various knots which occur between these discourses, the knotting of concerns relating to doctrines of the subject an aesthetics, between aesthetics and politics, politics and ethics, and so on. While this is clearly a very large set of concerns considered together, we are convinced that it is at these points of knotting that active and critical thought is best disposed in our contemporary context.

Woody Guthrie on PBS (he was)

Curious what Max has against Despite Joe Klein, appearing briefly here (that middle link being the closest this blog will ever come to mentioning a certain ridiculously behind the times and over-the-hill mealy-mouthed and pious, fascist-compromising smughole, corporate welfare lacky/crazed militarist/soon-to-be-"independent"in-more-ways-than-he-wishes Senator from New England). Update: yup.

Please visit and partake

...in the Long Sundaymposium on democracy, currently underway.   Thanks.

awkwardness unto death

The Sick New World embraces anti-mourning's latest prop, huggable urns, the radio informs...












But leaving that, where we found it, this is a rare confessional post about animal friends, specifically dogs, their being-unto-death philosophically considered, somewhat, and other things.

Essay

So many poems about the deaths of animals.
Wilbur's toad, Kinnell's porcupine, Eberhart's squirrel,
and that poem by someone–Hecht? Merrill?–
about cremating a woodchuck. But mostly
I remember the outrageous number of them,
as if every poet, I too, had written at least
one animal elegy; with the result that today
when I came to a good enough poem by Edwin Brock
about finding a dead fox at the edge of the sea
I could not respond; as if permanent shock
had deadened me. And then after a moment
I began to give way to sorrow (watching myself
sorrowlessly the while), not merely because
part of my being had been violated and annulled,
but because all these many poems over the years
had been necessary,–suitable and correct. This
has been the time of the finishing off of animals.
They are going away–their fur and their wild eyes,
their voices. Deer leap and leap in front
of the screaming snowmobiles until they leap
out of existence. Hawks circle once or twice
around their shattered nests and then they climb
to the stars. I have lived with them fifty years,
and now they are going, almost gone. I don't know
if the animals are capable of reproach.
But clearly they do not bother to say good-bye.

-Hayden Carruth, Brothers I Loved You All (Poems 1969-1977)





(Roger wisely recommends the above, and I have to agree.)


Keeping with the spirit of indirectly or barely thinking posts, I had planned on mentioning at least in passing Carruth, one of Vermont's finest poets, and this in lieu of a long and self-indulgent list of anecdotes about a friend who was a dog–a sister or daughter (and of course, mother, as all female dogs especially without pups are) of sorts; named "Sheena" though sometimes known simply as "my girl"–who passed away last week, lying in the summer night beneath a piano, having not eaten for three weeks. She often resembled in expression, somewhat uncannily, the animal pictured on the cover of Grenier's book (which I had read long ago, and should like to re-read now). Only the tiniest bit more blunt-nosed and muttish, curly-haired, retrieverish, perhaps.

Her will was strong, and she was I think sad, and reluctant unto death–as most are. As for "the end"–whenever this moment is ascribed–I suppose it was peaceful–as most people try to make themselves believe. And it was, at least in the sense that she had been awaiting death to (not)come, and probably died in her sleep, of a heart-attack or something similar (after consciousness had faded, I wish to believe).

She had lost her appetite, most likely as result of cancer–she was 16 (older than some), and we didn't do the expensive testing, tests that could only lead to more expensive and invasive treatment. We fed her on tuna oil, sardines, hamburgers and bread for as long as she would have it (mainly trying to keep her in fluids, and so as comfortable as possible). I confess to wishing for a drug, something to make her feel absolutely great–or at least no discomfort–one last time. To give her that gift–one last new experience/realm of pleasure–as a sort of inadequate thanks, but mostly just for her. But it wasn't to be.

The next morning her bony body was wrapped in a blanket and buried, in a spot she had chosen only days before (secluding herself away there by the garden, before being found and brought back inside one last time–we weren't ready yet). She had witnessed, such as dogs are able, the passing of two others (in that very house), but she was the first to go naturally (and the first not to be cremated). While not visibly in pain, by the end could barely lift her head. Or so I hear.

Having said imperfect goodbyes, I was off to do that Nature thing again, whereby one speedwalks through the woods (this time suburb-smelling woods), up mountains and by national civic memorials and massive powerlines in thunderstorms with a heavy pack of tasteless food, sweats rivers and drinks painstakingly filtered water, massages aching feet and sleeps in stuffy, 70-year-old shelters with other grimy and unshaven, snoring sweating people. People requiring a minimum of acknowledgement, but most often nice enough. People for whatever reason having decided to forsake the Starbucks world for seven months or so. Or rather, to forsake it for a week of swollen feet at a time, to binge on pizza, beer and hamburgers one fine anyday (or, in our case, other people's wedding cake and booze). Strange form of torture, this routine of binge and asceticism. Difficult to maintain in good spirits (Thoreau he was a pathologic liar)–once it becomes like any job, no longer novelty. Or so I hear.

Anyway owning and enjoying my own grumpiness somewhat, while hiking fast, was nothing terrible, and often the sensation of hiking was pretty great. Being cluster-bombed by aircorns at five in the morning, in a shelter with a metal roof, was even pretty great. The guilty chipmunk family, who are certainly legends by now, do it mostly for the sport, I wager, to provoke and tease the tired people into lurching furiously out and hurling back, which is entirely futile of course. Throwing anything one hundred feet in the air to much effect is strenuous and pointless work, and anyway they only fall back on the roof again.

Returning driving all through the night, at first mostly with trucks, the smells were distinct from state to state. Pennsylvania, warm mixture of wood (or something) burning and cow manure. One could sense their mood, the truckers, happily just fed, primed for the night (or was it the final push?–so many pulled off by the early morning, like logs before a river damn). The familiar rushing by of New Jersey and New York, windows down and radio blaring its preemptive alarm clock. (Should I stop? I should stop, and see so-and-so. No I'll keep going. Too late to call now; no time anyway.) Around New York, radio stations from Canada come in. Early morning on the American highway, reading billboards despite oneself, cultivating an interior and aloof, vague cynicism or rather numbness, at the spectacle of all this, tinged with the comfort of familiarity. Looking forward, perversely, to the toll-booth and the assurance of an encounter with someone more miserably bored than oneself, from whom you get to drive away, accelerating back to ticket-tempting speed in that moment of urgency before the dullness returns. Maybe change the station, light a cigarette. (No, not really, no more of those for me; I dislike everything they do to me, and in the immediate term they're just not pleasurable anymore. So I quit for the third time, having never really started up again. A part of this, admittedly, being the dagger looks from a certain other, earlier when she was in the drivers seat, and the car nearly left its tires on the road.) Somewhere between three and five the air cools to a chill at last, and the windows go up.

"Black eyes," is what I sometimes called her. For a period of several years, we were extremely close, possessive and overly-protective of each other, even. At middle age, she was convinced to chase sticks just deep enough to swim for the first time (always with that little Kierkegaardian leap dogs sometimes do, before losing her footing to the abyss), and to sneeze on command (or talk, and occasionally sing). Blond border-collie mutt, easily excitable, intelligent and sensitive, stubborn and neurotic, always performing 'work.' But also patient. Later in life, her eyes had that unconditionally adoring, happy look when sitting at attention, staring at my efforts in the garden these past few weeks from wherever she was planted (sometimes just so that her head was visible–she seemed proud of hiding herself this way, as if watching sheep in secret).

She may not have intended it, but her familiar gaze, in the absence of speech, often cleared a space for a certain silence in my life. Or maybe, performed a sort of witness (at once comforting and neurotic), to a relation with a silence that never belonged to anyone. A silence that has been torn from me now, by her departure.

How I admire films that don't avoid a certain silence, that attempt to speak alongside this silence without resolving it, in ways both more originally didactic or aesthetically documentarist. Or in a more metaphysical vein, always, Tarkovsky.

My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)

And what of the mass anonymous graves being dug and filled, as we speak, in Lebanon (or rather just outside the city walls), as Israel continues its civilian massacre with U.S. motherfucking blessing. How will the work of mourning take place there?

Not at all without first shedding our current "leaders," obviously, and their delusional, triumphalist and dogmatic, paranoid and expensive slumber, or rather sleep-driving SUV limosine rampage, in which our very democratic immune system has been drugged into destroying itself.

Inconvenient Truth +1

What a great discussion, or six.

You may wish to see also here.

Descartes Chomsky

Speaking at West Point [RealPlayer], in April on Just War Theory...

For a more critical, albeit general take, on Chomsky (if one were interested), one might see here, and here. And just in case it wasn't clear, I agree with all necessary caveats, giving respects where respects are due.

In any case this metafilter thread picking up on the Foucault/Chomsky "debate" that has been (re)making the rounds lately, begs the necessary corrective (tho stupidities continuing to have popular purchase is hardly news, and time is better spent showing instead of telling, and in other forms, I fully realize):

What's the most widely held misconception about you and your work?

That I'm a skeptical nihilist who doesn't believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That's stupid and utterly wrong, and only people who haven't read me say this. It's a misreading of my work that began 35 years ago, and it's difficult to destroy. I never said everything is linguistic and we're enclosed in language. In fact, I say the opposite, and the deconstruction of logocentrism was conceived to dismantle precisely this philosophy for which everything is language. Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith, and that I'm full of respect for the texts I read.

More thoughtful, original posting, hopefully, in about a week (it is (other peoples') wedding season, and hiking time again).

Godard

is apparently, by mainstream jerk-off standards, "alive and kicking"

La Jetée

Courtesy of Dan Visel.

not by man alone

Listening to Coltrane, ballads (thanks to Eric), on a rainy day. Reminded, that sentimental Baker sings a version of this one.

Democracy, meanwhile, is maybe an old man listening too hard. He is trying to feel..profundity–as it were. And so missing feeling–and the putting at risk–altogether.

If only fitting back into one body were so easily accomplished.

Reading on America, Tocqueville and Nancy.

Reconstruction, har har (sure, why not)

Alexandra Heifetz:

...Among the real philosophers and career academics, things are worse. In 1989, Brian Leiter, now an analytic philosopher and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, declared open war on continental philosophy by launching the Philosophical Gourmet Report. In the PGR, Leiter offered a ranking of the top philosophy programs in the US. At first hard copies of the rankings were distributed; then in 1996 the PGR went online. Geared toward prospective undergrads and based on the “quality of faculty” factor, the rankings were clearly, profoundly biased toward analytic programs. Some continental-leaning departments hung near the bottom of the list; most didn’t make it at all.

On the PGR website, which is now very fancy, there’s a section called “Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy,” a concise version of the introduction Leiter wrote for the book A Future for Philosophy. Here he distinguishes between them as two styles of doing philosophy, rather than categories for the kind of books to be read:

Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).

Leiter seems to think he’s dropping a bomb—note the disparagements of “obscure” and “loosely speaking”—but the house of philosophy had begun to self-destruct half a century before. Since the 1950s analytic philosophers have made the same complaints: that continental philosophy has a messy literary quality, that it wastes time with “concepts-in-quotations,” and that it bothers itself with cultural things like genocide and the Internet. And yet, boom! Like a frantic seven-year-old, Leiter defends his kind of philosophy by pushing out people who don’t agree with him.

Not all continental scholars are concerned with historicity. Some are: the postmodernists, the feminists, the critical race theorists. But what the continental has tried to preserve (and what the analytic has tried to run from) is a sense that, even while pursuing self-preservation, philosophers should never give up on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone. The analytic philosopher takes his scalpel to the concept of democracy; the continental presents us with an account of the brutal pacification of the east. One is not more philosophically interesting than the other, but certainly the second is more interesting to real people. And after all, there are still real people asking questions—for instance, the undergraduate who takes a course on ancient Greek philosophy and wonders why the platonic philosopher-king banished poetry while on television presidents use the highly poetic rhetoric of wartime. In universities with hard-core analytic cliques, like NYU or Princeton, continental philosophers end up outside of the philosophy department and find a home in comp lit, women’s, or African-American studies. In those settings they won’t be the ones to teach classes on the western philosophical tradition, and the task of teaching the ancients (and the recents) is left to the analytic philosophers. In their classrooms, “meaningful” words are more important than rhetoric, “sophomoric” everyday questions are banned, and in place of natural curiosity a student learns pragmatic methodology.

Continental philosophy isn’t obsolete. But the continental education, that ideal classroom in which Wittgenstein and Foucault are both taught, is becoming very difficult to find. This should worry us more than the fates of individual graduate students, whichever gang they choose. Today’s missiles are being dropped east of the Holland House Library.

Food for thought, as one revisits such things in turning to America.

Update: It has come to my attention that this polemic, excerpted above in the general interests of Internet communism, may be, as indeed polemics often are, slightly unfair, in this case to Brian Leiter, and furthermore that it may even contain factual inaccuracies of one degree or another. Please feel free to read his partly tangential, partly confirming, in any case blustering reply (linked several times by one "anonymous" soul in comments below) and come to your own well-nuanced and adult conclusions as always, needless to say.

Update 2: Also, dear fellow "random morons" if you will: please do take a look at this, and this. Thanks.

SAGP

A placeholder (light posting for a spell)

• More and more and more on global warming. One thing consistently bothering me about the whole Gore book/movie exposé/presentation is that he never seems to emphasize the implications of a delayed response – that it takes roughly 40 years (though this may be decreasing as things accelerate) to register the effects of current emmission levels, etc. You might think, then, that the fact things are melting exponentially faster practically by the year would be cause for even greater concern, that is, when realizing that whatever we do, nothing will begin to improve for at least forty years! What we are seeing now, in Gore's footage, is the direct consequence of our actions forty years ago. We have no idea how much worse it's going to get, only that it will be exponentially so, and inevitably (at least for n + 40 years). And so on. Oedipus, indeed.

Naturally the very possibility, that no matter what we do a new Ice Age may be coming (at least for Europe) is, how shall we say, a prospective truth a tad too inconvenient for any politician to dare emphasize. Better to just go home, buy that hybrid car, praise the adaptability of capitalism, and pray.

• A translation.

• An interview.

• Jodi Dean on Theory Blogging.

• A disturbing article (via). And, meanwhile...speaking of whom.

• A typically excellent post by Michael Bérubé (how very common and tired, the "dissenting" straw man so habitually beloved of conservative opportunists does become). Bérubé's still riding Chomsky, too, for those of you wishing to have that debate (go there).

• So much for Civil Rights, say the reactionary ruling class, bunker-headed politicians (for those of you interested in tomorrow's news).

• A discussion ongoing, with interesting...tangents.

Happy Father's Day (to the tune of Dylan's #7 installment)

they're talking Schmitt

Very good discussion ongoing, at that Eclectic Australian/American/Canadian/French/Italian/Swedish/Brit blog, as you know. Germans more than welcome too, as it leaves the blog economy of interest orbit altogether, becoming-journal..

Foster Wallace

From an interview, courtesy of wood s lot (link to latter of which being hardly necessary):

Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.

LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things?

DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. We've all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!" But we already "know" U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. What's engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?

B.E.

via here

speaking of

...Bob, the bootlegged one (or two)...

Good stuff.

The Leiter Industry

Matt Christie
to Brian Leiter Aug 31 (23 hours ago)
From: Matt Christie Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: BLEITER@law.utexas.edu
Date: Aug 31, 2006 4:23 PM
Subject: please correct your post

Mr. Leiter-

While I understand your feelings of umbrage, which are indeed in this case to some degree justified, if not also desiring to be an institution unto themselves: if you are going to resort to calling names, and specifically to calling myself and those who frequent my site "random morons," twice now I do believe, kindly at least have the courtesy to link properly to my post!

Unless, of course, you are afraid for what free-thinking people may actually find?

I look forward to your productive participation in our upcoming symposium on Derrida, and in particular on the articles appearing in SubStance Magazine.

Yours bemusedly,

MC

Chris Marker

Films not yet seen:

- Chris Marker : Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953, 30mn.)

- Chris Marker : Sunday in Peking ( 1956, 22mn.)

- Chris Marker : Dimanche à Pékin (1956, French Version, 22mn.)

- Chris Marker : Letter from Siberia (English version. 1957, 62mn.)

- Chris Marker : Description of a Struggle / d’un Combat (1960, Hebrew with english AND french subtitles, 60mn.)

- Chris Marker : Cuba Si (Original french version, some Spanish… 1961, 52mn.)

- Chris Marker : La Jetée (english or french version – 1962, 28mn.)

- Chris Marker : Al Valparaiso (English subs. 1962, 34mn.)

- Chris Marker : Le Mystère Koumiko (subtitled –1965, 54mn.)

- Chris Marker : La sixième face du pentagone (Original french version, 1968, 28 min.)

- Chris Marker : The Train Rolls On (1971, 32mn.)

- Chris Marker : The Embassy (English Version. 1973, 20mn.)

- Chris Marker : Sans Soleil / Sunless (english or french version – 1982, 110mn.)

& / Chris on Chris (documentary, 10mn.)

- Chris Marker : A.K. The Making of Ran (English Version 1985, 71mn.)

- Chris Marker : Le Tombeau d’Alexandre / The Last Bolshevik (1992, 2 x 60mn.Fench & english versions)

- Chris Marker : Level Five (English Subtitled. Upgraded ! 1997, 110mn.)

- Chris Marker : IMMEMORY CD-ROM (1997, hours of exquisite delights ! French PC)

- Chris Marker : One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (1999, 55mn.)

- Chris Marker : Chats Perchés (2004, 59mn) / Petit Bestiaire de Chris Marker includes 5 shorts : Chat écoutant la musique, An Owl is an Owl is an Owl, Zoo Piece, Bullfight in Okinawa & Slon Tango (26mn.)

- Chris Marker : Les Groupes Medvekine Box set : Chris. Marker et Slon etc. Coll. 243mn. On 4 DVD un-compressed : À bientôt, j’espère, La Charnière STDK, Classe de Lutte, Rhodia 4/8, Sochaux 11 juin, Les trois quart de la vie à Sochaux, Avec le sang des autres, Septembre Chilien

- Chris Marker : Olympia 52 (1952, 82mn.)

- Chris Marker : Owl’s Heritage (1989, 13x26mn.)

Any recommendations?

Eduardo Galeano

I was curious about Eduardo's new book of stories, having heard some things in the news lately. So, I decided to buy a copy.

Not here, precisely, but sometimes he looks rather like John Malkovich.

Latino Boom

Good news for literature is sometimes worth repeating. The recently released Latino Boom (now with its very own website!) is a unique and unprecedented anthology of Latino fiction, poetry, short stories and drama, and by all accounts an essential volume for any teacher in the complex and growing field. Or for that matter just any lover of literature. Anyway I've had the chance to read through a good portion of it, and it really is very good.

From the preface:

Latino Boom presents some of the best Latino Literature from the past 20 years. As the first anthology of its kind to supplement its selections with contextual background materials, it also maintians a holistic approach that distinguishes it...Based on our own firsthand experience as teachers...this work has been tested where it counts most...

Indeed, I can vouch for this, as one of the editors is my brother.

By maintaining this focus on recent writings, dating from 1985 to the present, we have been able to concentrate upon works in four major genres–the short story, poetry, drama, and the essay–and include selections our students have often found most enjoyable and fascinating. Yet we want to emphasize the fact that this anthology presents only the tail end of a long tradition of writing by Latinos, one that stretches back to the European conquest of the Americas in the early 1500s, and much of it written in Spanish.

Beyond the need to limit the scope of the book, we have chosen to concentrate on the modern period because it offers some of the richest literary achievements that have substantially changed the landscape of Latino writing. After all, it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that the labels themselves–Hispanic American literature and Latino literature–came into common use. All over the United States, prolific young Latino writers are reinventing the literary landscape. The explosion of South American literary works in the 1970s and 1980s–a period referred to as the "Latin American Literary Boom"–is now mirrored in the U.S. Latino literature.

Focusing on contemporary works also allows us to broaden the book's range to include Latino authors who have been underrepresented in anthologies and other collections, namely women and other less–well-known writers from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. With an eye toward looking at works in their entirety, we have avoided excerpts from longer fiction such as novels. There are a few exceptions to this general guideline, however: Sandra Benítez's "Fulgencio Llanos: El Fotógrafo," and–it could be argued–Edgardo Vega Yunqué's "The Barbosa Express" are both stories and individual chapters in genre-bending novels composed of a series of connected short stories.

It's got a lovely cover, doesn't it?

In very short, the anthology renders a complex period bravely accessible, while steering admirably clear, in its conception, of such things as over-simplification and easy polemic. The approach is deeply pedagogical and literary, with careful outlines of various schools of reception, and detailed engagement with such questions as revolve today around narrative and autobiography, just to name a few. There is throughout a very native, deeply polyglot sense for this literature's often hybrid, heterogeneous origins and currents. As such, it is also a collection with a very real social conscience, and obviously unafraid to grapple with issues of cultural and historical context (there are wonderful, detailed maps and admirably unflinching, politically objective timelines detailing various U.S. invasions throughout the years, and so on). Needless to say, however, the literary is nowhere sacrificed purely to questions of mere politics. All in all, a highly original, and admirably-contextualized compilation. Clearly an indispensable volume not only for teachers, but for anyone concerned for the future of literature in the 21st century. There will no doubt be much more to come (provided, of course, we are to survive, to some day read about it, and in places other than the NYTBR.).


nb. Might I also direct your attention to some very wonderful scans, perhaps of related interest: A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (courtesy of Mark Woods).