This is the first in a series of posts in which I outline a certain aesthetic fixation on what I am simply calling ’stupidity,’ which seemed to be at the front of my brain when considering this passing decade. I make no claim as to its ubiquity, dominance, or even frequency.

[UPDATED below]

The prophecy was first heard in 2006 , but by then it was mere journalism. America is dumb and getting dumber. Mike Judge’s dystopian Idiocracy assumes the logical outcome of consumer society is cognitive and cultural retardation, encapsulated in an infamous montage where the Fuddrucker’s logo gradually morphs into:

That the film was made a martyr by its distributor 20th Century Fox probably has less to do with its vision of cultural decline (buttressed by the eugenicist argument that the greater popularity of breeding among the lower classes is mass stupidity’s efficient cause) than with this montage sequence, along with the other spoofs on mass market brands — ‘Brawndo’ energy drinks, Pepsi and Carls Jr. as government sponsors, Starbucks gives handjobs, characters are named after brands — crossing the line of acceptability.

These corporate defacements are the best thing about an otherwise unremarkable and poorly conceived comedy, such that it’s perhaps better thought of as an Adbusters-style toolkit for ‘culture jamming’ (sort of how it’s used in the above link) than an actual film.

That said, it was one of the few satires the American film industry managed to produce in the ’00s, and probably the most effective in the traditional sense of the genre. One could comment here on the failure of narrative to capture the complete and total travesty that was American life in the first decade of the new millennium, that only the most fragmentary and/or ad-drenched forms of media (television, the Internet) managed to say anything coherent about the present as a historical moment that didn’t consist of 100% recycled material.

Or one could just watch Southland Tales. Released in 2007 and set in an alternate 2008, also a ’satire’ of sorts, it attempts to reproduce the aesthetics of media ubiquity: a digital interface that handles cutting between different narrative threads (complete with news ticker), an ‘ironic’ cast of B-list celebrities, the cinematography of a music video or luxury car ad (when not via handicam), bad sketch comedy,  old-fashioned metafiction, comic book tie-ins, and lots of stuff happening all the time. Yet as packed as it is, and despite the literally apocalyptic buildup, the film is oddly boring. Maybe because the End Times are already here — the reality the film assumes from the beginning. Director Richard Kelly attempts to provide structure via Justin Timberlake’s interminable voice-over narration (added after its panning at Cannes) and a pointlessly complicated plot that tries to disguise the fact that it has nothing to do with anything and could in fact have been plagiarized from a ’90s postmodern conspiracy novel (itself ripped off of Robert Anton Wilson and/or Thomas Pynchon). As Gerry and I discussed in conversation, it collapses three historical moments into the same ‘present’ — its references are contemporary, its aesthetic sensibility is ’90s, and its nostalgia (as with Kelly’s earlier Donnie Darko) is for the late ’80s, just prior to the End of History. Though perhaps tempting, it’s hard to deny that the film tries to be, now and again, a satire, even a political satire. The attempt fails catastrophically.

It is of course a film that was ‘too big to not fail,’ so all appropriate slack should be cut.  And its failure is an interesting one. Steven Shaviro gives a more positive take here, in what is overall one of his best pieces of online writing:

Booed at Cannes in 2006, and both a critical and box-office disaster in 2007, the film obviously has not found its niche, nor found its cult, nor even made the sort of negative impact that would qualify it as a Cultural Event on the order of all the things that it narrates. I’m inclined to think that this is simply because the film is too prophetic: which is also to say, too real, too close to the actuality of which it is a part and which it anatomizes and mirrors, to be receivable at this point in time. The most alien messages are the ones that point out clearly what is staring us in the face. All the more so, in that such messages can have no sense of detachment, no critical perspective, to provide a justification for what they say. Southland Tales declines to exempt itself in the slightest from the overall situation that it describes; it declines even to overtly criticize that situation, as this would mean having to step outside it, as well as because simply presenting it, in its own compulsive mirroring and feeding back of itself, is already more than enough. Kelly’s film is too weird to be taken up by a mainstream audience; but also too mainstream, too much a part of the so-called mainstream, to please viewers and critics who are looking for either visionary, experimental formalism, or an informed oppositional politics. It also explodes the very being of cinema (including experimental cinema) so slyly and casually that it unavoidably offends most cinephiles.

Toning down this hyperbolic praise, I would say that, at its best and worst, Southland Tales is ‘about’ a very specific sort of stupidity, albeit one that has been building for quite some time, a kind of apocalyptic cognitive failure, what would happen if we lived in Jean Baudrillard’s alternate universe  but with his transcendent, guiding intelligence replaced by the 24/7 cliche flow of a comic book nerd. Because, insofar as the media world of absolute commodification really does ‘map’ reality, then that is exactly what has happened to ‘critical discourse on culture’ in this decade, in which I include satirical and ’serious’ films, novels, visual art, etc. as well as niche genres like academic monographs. If we were to grant all the absurdities assumed by those who have been making such claims since the ’80s (?), it would be even more of a misreading to try to label Southland Tales as creative ‘genius’ or a ‘masterpiece.’ In order to read its intelligence failure as a virtue instead of a symptom — to read it as ‘naive,’ as an epic instead of a failed satire — one paradoxically has to ignore its own botched attempts at distinguishing parodic frame from parodied content. One has to decontextualize it from itself.  Analogous to the way that vital bit of postmodern folklore, “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is so often taken as the beginning of analysis rather than its dead end. All this leads me to hypothesize an identifiable strategy of misreading emergent in this decade, one perhaps necessary for the application of traditional aesthetic criticism to certain new kinds of material, and again not limited to academic or intellectual critique.

UPDATE BEGINS: An update, if I can call it that, of camp:

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

UPDATE ENDS

As a completed, reified product, Southland Tales is more clearly looked at as a bigger (and thus more ‘epic’) enclosure and/or recapitulation of media forms and stereotypes than would be possible for entry-level users like you and me, its sublime (yet context-minimal) moments no more or less so than any available on the myriad Internet video networks into which they’ve already been displaced. A chunk of media time, regurgitated. And then, (seamlessly) reintegrated.

The continuing outrage over Obama’s Afghanistan speech is both justified and predictable. Nevertheless it reveals a few interesting things about his public image, and the different levels of acceptable narrative. Everyone knew he was going to make that speech; the plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan was never in doubt. Perversely, this fact is sometimes used to defend Obama from criticism, the idea apparently being that since the decision was unsurprising it’s hypocritical to attack it. Underlying such a claim is the pernicious view of the president as ‘commander-in-chief,’ a kind of elected king whose every action has the a priori approval of the general will.

And yet.

There is something to be said for the idea that Obama’s astonishingly successful marketing campaign expanded the sense of public authorship over his presidency beyond the rote mechanism of voting. The sense, not of course the reality. Provided we set aside the bizarre conspiracy theories about Obama’s early Afghanistan rhetoric being merely a clever ruse, Afghanistan was always the issue that no one wanted to talk about. As others have noted, Tom Hayden’s trajectory from starry-eyed supporter to angry critic is exemplary here. A common feature of both Obama’s marketing and his progressive/left-liberal support was that his election would somehow galvanize social movements capable of pushing him leftward into being. Clearly that didn’t happen. I think it’s a mistake to try to look back and claim that, at some point, if not for some failure of resolve, it was possible for an authentic left movement to be generated from the Obama campaign. That was never possible. For a movement of the size Obama summoned to get himself into office to have an independent existence, it would have had to be stolen from him, a fact admittedly more obvious in hindsight.

If the idea of the recent escalation order as betrayal does not exactly hold up in court, it perhaps suggests a different framework for understanding what Obama is for the left: an investment with a variable time limit. An investment of labor (the ‘movement’), fantasy (Hope and Change), and a degree of critical restraint (‘wait and see’). The limit was always Afghanistan, which there was a tacit agreement not to mention until it happened, in order to sustain the fantasy. Within this designated honeymoon period, disappointment after disappointment prepared Obama’s audience for something else: apathy. Now that time is up, the internal battle for the progressives who haven’t been paid for is between anger and apathy.

One battlefield revolves around motive. There is rampant speculation as to why Obama would agree to invade Afghanistan. Just like with Bush, there’s a complete unwillingness to consider the existence of any sort of long-term plan for the region. Obama is motivated by typical Beltway ’short-sightedness,’ the ideology of preemptive war, he is fooled by inflated reports about the danger presented by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the need to ‘appear strong’ in the face of ‘our enemies.’ His actions are, in short, the products of a series of accidents and stereotypical worldviews. The publicly stated views of his closest foreign policy advisors are ignored, such as this by his National Security Advisor James Jones:

Jones is a fierce advocate of NATO expansion. As commander of the alliance from 2003 to 2006, he pushed for it to take greater responsibility for securing oil supplies in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. “Our activities are definitely moving to the East and to the South,” he declared, speaking to the National Press Club in 2006. He pushed NATO hard–encountering stiff resistance from European allies–to strengthen its commitment to Afghanistan, and he got NATO involved with training missions in Iraq too. No longer, he says, can NATO confine itself to the defense of Europe; it must increasingly engage in out-of-area operations. “The term ‘out of area’ doesn’t really apply anymore, because that geographical restriction has faded into history,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2006. “NATO’s also getting ready to certify a NATO response force, which is also a new operational concept that will give the alliance much more flexible capability to do things rapidly at very long distances.”

In 2007 Jones became president of the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, meanwhile joining the boards of directors of Chevron and Boeing. Among the eighty-eight recommendations of the institute–including, naturally, Drill, baby, drill!–is this: “The U.S. government should engage the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on energy security challenges and encourage member countries to support the expansion of its mandate to address energy security.”

Certainly the aforementioned ideologies and bad attitudes exist — further down the page Jones himself voices them: “I personally don’t believe that the United States can afford to be perceived as having not been successful in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and I think the consequences for such a perception or such a reality will be with us for years to come in terms of our ability to be a nation of great influence in the twenty-first century.” But these views are not detachable, standalone, autonomous ‘memes.’ They continue to exist, despite obvious ridiculousness, because they are mutually supportive pieces in an ideological structure that includes a set of rational strategies for ensuring American and ‘Western’ hegemony.

When George W. Bush was president, there was not the same level of curiosity about his individual motives for invading Iraq. He is, after all, a dummy. Obama is not a dummy — he gives inspiring speeches! With liberal values! While Bush and Obama’s bad decisions are commonly accepted as products of external forces rather than their personal villainy, Bush’s decisions were attributed to a conspiracy (Cheney and Rumsfeld snarling at the helm), while Obama is fooled by arguments, the same specious arguments we all read in the papers and online. Or by a completely understandable (however craven) desire to appease opposing interests by giving an incoherent speech. He is then, like his target audience, a figure of contradictions, internal hesitation, self-doubt, and strenuous intellectual turmoil; his failures are shared by ‘us.’ This is the subtle difference in reception between a president we — America’s liberal majority — despise and one we identify with.

The problem with genre in the various fields of cultural study is that, like any concept, it has a history and a limited scope, and yet there are too many objects to analyze for any of them to escape categorization. The result is an incoherent mishmash of terms, punctuated by occasional abortive attempts to assert order. I suspect a big reason why they always fail is because they can’t make themselves fit with the essayistic, anti-scientific form of most cultural study. Here’s one that does, by Carl Freedman from Critical Theory and Science Fiction:

“…a genre is not a classification but an element or, better still, a tendency that, in combination with other relatively autonomous generic elements or tendencies, is active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text that is itself understood as a complexly structured totality. In other words, a text is not filed under a generic category; instead, a generic tendency is something that happens within a text” (20).

He’s not the only one to say this; one can note that this notion of genre, coming after the structuralist and poststructuralist debates of mid-century, is actually the dominant one today within academic literary and film criticism. Its notion of the individual text as the primary unit of study, a “complexly structured totality” whose fundamental and unique distinctiveness only emphasizes further the multitudes it contains, seems custom made for close reading, opposed as it is to any kind of empiricism.

But in its suggestion of transindividual entities (genres) being re(?)constructed from within the apparently stable text, it contains the seeds of a very different approach. It may be that only now when the serious study of literature is a minority interest, when Philip Roth can argue that the novel’s future will be “cultic” and surprise no one, that the field of literature can be cleared for genre to be useful again.

I’m of course thinking of Franco Moretti’s work on the novel. In Graphs, Maps, Trees, he suggests, on the one hand, a shift in thinking that takes into account the historical fluctuation within every novelistic genre, or genre cycles, where say the Gothic appears in the late 18th century, declines in the early 19th, and reappears in the late 19th and again at different moments during the 20th: “variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle — and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite…” The novel then benefits from its capacity to “use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors.” This process can only be seen at the level of the cycle — individual episodes (individual novels or abstract blocks or stages of time) and the  presentation of transhistorical categories as timeless tend to conceal it.

This approach nevertheless requires the use of stable generic categories, though individual texts can belong to several at once. One has to be able to say, to take an uncontroversial example, that the late 19th century and late 18th century Gothic are both Gothic. More controversial are units like ’spy novel’ or ‘historical novel’ and the supposed timeframes (arbitrarily borrowed from other scholars). One could argue that these categories only make sense after the breakdown of classical genre, literature’s complete commodification, and the rise of distinct market categories in the 19th century. Only at this point do generic markers take on an empirical value.

On the other hand, in the Trees section, Moretti adopts a quasi-Darwinian framework for tracking the evolution of stylistic tropes, structural features, etc., apparently on the level of ‘memes.’ It seems to me an approach like this requires database analysis and developments in pattern recognition software and machine learning to be really successful. As far as I know Moretti is pursuing precisely that, but I have no idea if it’s working out beyond this amusing blurb in Wired.

At any rate, both approaches undermine the centrality of the text as the primary unit of analysis and permit the study of literature en masse. The centrality of canon and author are also undermined, which might sound old hat to anyone who’s read their Barthes and Foucault until they look around and are forced to admit that canons and authors are still very much central to literary study. Internal resistance movements like feminist and postcolonial theory can’t contest the eurocentrism of the Great Books without asserting alternative canons and authors. Cultural studies relies on the canons produced by pop culture. And perennially disrespected genres like sci-fi, horror, fantasy, detective novels, etc. can’t get ’serious’ attention without a canon. Studying the novel (and probably other literary/textual genres, like philosophy, say) outside the metaphysics of bourgeois individualism it did so much to propagate — of which the most egregious is probably intellectual property — will require moving beyond these structural limits, and Moretti’s work is valuable for this reason alone.

*

All of which only serves to make me feel more awkward, because despite my growing interest in the history of fantasy, for which genre is a central concern, I’m not sure Moretti’s work can help me. And so what follows are some barely organized notes on potential problems, as I see them, in the empirical use of genre as an organizing concept for such a project.

From the beginning of literature, there were arguments over mimesis. From just before the beginning of the modern European novel in the 18th century, there were arguments over fiction, romance, verisimilitude, in a word, ‘realism’ — what would become the ruling ideology of literary representation, the very presupposition of ‘novel.’ These arguments came on the heels of the 17th century controversies over the proper form of natural philosophy. Should it include the wondrous, miraculous, and strange? The whispered rumors of sea travelers, the eyewitness accounts of the vulgar? The evils of witchcraft? The society of men on the moon? The Royal Society’s answer was, eventually, no. In the 18th century such things would be relegated to a psychologized, pathologized imagination, something that needed to be rigorously controlled, in the behavior of the vulgar no less than in the minds and the epistemologies of the educated. And in the early 19th century, shortly after the formalization of aesthetics in Germany and the revolution in France, Tzetvan Todorov’s ‘fantastic’ emerges in Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse as the other of realism, that “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” The multitude of 17th and 18th century genres — the chivalric romance, the Gothic, the Oriental, the pornographic, the conte philosophique, the fable, Tory satire, etc. — the popular as well as the esoteric — are corralled and contained in the figure of the other and the faculty of the (creative) imagination. Prose, the discourse of histoire, grants itself permission to openly disclose visions.

Somewhere in all of this is the role of imaginative prose in its own marginalization, and its role in the war over knowledge that builds and rebuilds ‘the modern.’

Following the history depicted in this thumbnail sketch, we find all the traditional fantastic genres: fantasy, science fiction, modern fairy tale, supernatural horror, etc. 20th century attempts to categorize them lie between two main tendencies: 1) Russian formalist-derived methods of synchronization, transforming the field into a collection of tropes which can be spatialized and chronologized – born of course in the study of folktales 2) ‘deep’ psychologizing methods such as those of Jung and Freud (modernized by Lacan). These are all modes of analyzing linguistic signs, whether they attempt to delve into the individual or mass psyche behind the text, or limit themselves to the organization of its surface. To put it too quickly, their weakness is their ahistoricism.

But how to narrate this long history without reifying the generic markers and without recourse to nominalism? What historical struggle do these forms manifest? No single set of genres is adequate because genre itself undergoes at least two rebirths in the midst of this history. Critics have found it necessary to deploy a protagonist large enough for the task. Fredric Jameson’s favored term, following Frye, is ‘romance’ — the macro structure of the counter-novel. Where ‘fantasy,’ referring to a non-’realistic’ content, might name a psychological desire (following Freud), romance for Jameson, referring to a non-mimetic narrative structure, is the name for a historical desire, the recapturing of the “worldness of world” stamped away by the onset of capitalism.

For Lukacs, Bakhtin, and Jameson, the “novel is the end of genre;” the study of literature in the wake of the novel (as the literary shorthand for ‘modernity’) requires different structures: “properly used, genre theory must always in one way or another project a model of the coexistence or tension between several generic modes or strands: and with this methodological axiom the typologizing abuses of traditional genre criticism are definitely laid to rest.”

There is, it seems to me, a contradiction here between Jameson’s simultaneous emphasis on historical narrative (structured around a historical subject) and on a kind of heterotopic spatialized history, where multiple histories vie for dominance within any given moment. Here is Edward Said on narrative (from Orientalism):

“Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake ‘classical’ civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Appollonian fictions asserted by vision.”

And recall that for this early Jameson at least, “storytelling [is] the supreme function of the human mind.”

Does a history of literature have to take narrative form? Are the limitations inherent in these kinds of narratives the same as those so often criticized in the novel (i.e. the centrality of an individual, transcendent protagonist)? European prose narrative, as far as I know, gets its start in the form of the compilation of folktales, the proto-encyclopedia (like the various Arthurian cycles), where narrative inheres in a structure of knowledge, not the novel, where narrative is supposedly primary. The forms of the fantastic retain this connection, albeit in different ways. Stories are as weak as they are strong.

Hoardings
In recent years, some people have adopted the list form only to strip it to its foundation, yielding ultra-simple pages consisting of sequences of images cobbled together with little or no explanation, each image radically different from its neighbors, each likely to confound, amuse, or disquiet. These web pages are often “personal” pages belonging to artists or groups of artists. Text is relegated to minimal captions in these Internet wunderkammern, and sometimes abolished entirely.

Let’s call such a page a hoarding. The word can refer to a stash of collected goods, but can also mean a billboard, or the temporary wall thrown up around a construction site. The look of the hoarding is similar to that of a particular type of artist’s book that has flourished in the last 15 years or so, featuring page after page of heterogeneous images, a jumble of magazine scans, amateur snapshots, downloaded jpegs, swipes from pop culture and art history alike, some small, some full-bleed, none with explication. The similarity is not coincidental, for “the last 15 years or so” defines the Internet age as we know it, with its ubiquitous, colorful mosaics, evidently a powerful influence on publishing of all kinds.

What can we say about the experience of scrolling through a hoarding, trying to understand the procession of pictures? As in traditional fashion magazines, we find excitement and confusion in equal measure, with one catalyzing the other. Beyond that, it often seems that any information or knowledge in these pages is glimpsed only through a slight fog of uncertainty. Has an image been spirited out of the military defense community, or is it journalism; is it medical imaging, or pornography; an optical-illusion, or a graph; is it hilarious, disturbing, boring; is it doctored, tweaked, hue-saturated, multiplied, divided; is it a ghost or a vampire? In any event, the ultimate effect is: “What the fuck am I looking at?” Something that hovers in your peripheral vision.

One might ask, how does this depart from the queasily ambivalent celebration of the image that has characterized the last fifty years of pop culture, possibly the last century and a half of mass media? It could be the muteness of the offering, the lack of justification or context. But the observation that modern media divorce phenomena from context is a commonplace, and usually an invitation to reflect on the increasingly fragmented nature of experience. A hoarding is notable because while it is a public representation of a performed, elective identity, it is demonstrated through what appears to be blankness, or at least the generically blank frenzy of media.

This may be a response to the embarrassing and stupid demands of interactivity itself, which foists an infantilizing rationality on all “Internet art,” and possibly Internet use generally, by prioritizing the logic of the connection, thereby endorsing smooth functioning and well-greased transit. Recourse to the almost mystically inscrutable may be understood as a block to the common sensical insistence on the opposition of information to noise, and as a form of ritualized unknowing.

It could also be a dismissal of the ethos of self-consciously generous transparency that characterizes “web 2.0”: the freely offered opinions, the jokey self-effacement, the lapses into folksiness in the name of a desire to forge reasoned agreement and common experience among strangers. It is wise to mistrust this earnest ethos, which is inevitably accompanied by sudden and furious policing of breaches in supposedly normative behavior. This is not to argue that such consensus building is disingenuous, rather that it is simply politics, in the sense that politics is at heart concerned with separating out friends from enemies. In this view, the hard-fought equilibrium of an orderly on-line discussion is indistinguishable from its scourge, the flame war: reasonably or violently, both aim at resolution and a kind of confirmation of established precepts. Might a hoarding—a public billboard that declines to offer a coherent position, a temporary wall that blocks reasoned discourse—escape the duty to engage ratio and mores and resolution, in a kind of negative utopian critique? No, it probably cannot. But the perversity of its arrangement of pictures speaks for itself, and what it speaks of is manipulation.

Seth Price

One cannot just set the pro forma Schmittian (just to give it a proper name) logic of this piece aside, but it is a rather elegant illustration. A ready made image for someone else’s ‘hoard,’ and my first revision would be to replace that 18th-century insult with a coinage from one of blogdom’s dearly departed, an Arcades Blog. Which is itself another reference, which is the whole point. Why does a series of captionless images have to be irrational or perverse? One can imagine future art historians concluding that the age of mass marketing’s greatest achievement lay in convincing the world’s consumers that images (and through the backdoor, ambiguity) are a priori the language of unreason. Certainly images can be used to think. More pernicious is the idea that images which are ’simply’ affect manipulators (that is, have ‘nonsense’ as their manifest content) are for that reason lacking in logical sequence.

Immaturity. Escape. Vertigo. The cynical romance of commodities.

Though I have made frequent use of the photo montage on this blog, a more concentrated experiment can be found here. Even something like this, an image or two posted every now and then, sometimes with words, sometimes without, all apparently fitting the idea of the ‘hoard,’ is not without pattern or immune to meaning. If the wunderkammern were overdetermined by the excessive display of strange and uncommon objects, the image blog (here’s one of my favorites; here’s another) is a collection of moments of an all-too familiar process of circulation, captured, and in that moment of capture recirculated as something novel, their significance altered. ‘Defamiliarized,’ even. Even when their authorial anchor is just an arbitrary sign: traxus4420.

My naive intent for the tumble blog is the same as with this one: for each post to be useful as part of a new process of thought. Failing that, it is also made to be ignored. Is a challenge to ‘common sense’ possible with these things at all? If so, it can only be by demanding different kinds of attention and different kinds of thinking. Because the facade of irrationality that merely prompts us to “reflect on the increasingly fragmented nature of experience” is advertising. Though it might be all that separates one from the other is the presence or absence of a product.

Work and play have been keeping me from this blog. That will change, the sooner the better. Until then, here’s what I’ve been thinking about:

What is the role of humanistic knowledge and information if they are not to be unknowing (many ironies here) partners in commodity production and marketing, so much so that what humanists do may in the end turn out to be a quasi-religious concealment of this peculiarly unhumanistic process? A true secular politics of interpretation sidesteps this question at its peril.

– Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”

Though I am not interested in a politics of interpretation, I am interested in a secular politics. Perhaps I believe the two are incompatible.

Moving on:

Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.

– Heart Sutra

True words are not ‘beautiful.’

‘Beautiful’ words are not true.

Those who know are not ‘widely learned.’

The ‘widely learned’ do not know.

The good do not have much.

Those who have much are not good.

The Sage accumulates nothing.

The more he does for others, the more he has.

The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.

The Way of Heaven is pointed but does no harm.

The Way of the Sage is to serve without competing.

Dao De Jing Verse 81

Contrary to most amateur readings of Buddhist and Daoist tenets I’ve seen (I don’t read the professionals), my sense is that they don’t at all consider ‘harmony’ to be easy or automatic. Of course, I can only refer to my own tiny inroad into (the very different) Buddhism and Taoism, but it seems evident that much as ‘Being’ might be the central problem for  Greek philosophy and its offspring (whether through the logic of sympathetic resemblance or identity and difference), Harmony is rather what these texts are about; it is their organizing problem. The reactionary conservativism and historical fatalism that seem to be their general political tenor is a consequence. But another consequence is the rejection of ‘the Being of Being’ or ‘Being’s being-for-itself’ as a false problem however much it is also a inevitable one, whose solution is its negation. The real question for positive knowledge is the relentlessly practical one of appropriate relations. The effect of meditation on Being is the foreclosure of any logic of Being, and the ‘utility’ of philosophy is its own self-abnegation. I believe this point is what continues to sustain my interest in these practices, and how I might one day justify my frivolous, Orientalizing indulgences.

This post is in response to a funny thing that happened a couple days ago on Facebook. Gerry Canavan comments on it here:  throughout the day, “thousands” of Facebook users posted a pro-health care-reform message as their ’status update’ in  a sudden outbreak of ‘viral activism.’ The whole thing peaked when Obama himself joined in. Watch the virus spread here.

As Gerry puts it:

We saw the same phenomenon early in the summer during Iran’s so-called Twitter Revolution, which had two overlapping and sometimes conflicting modes: the use of Twitter by people within Iran as a organizing and news-distributing tool and the use by people *outside* Iran for the purposes of vicarious participation in political struggle. Then, as now, the important thing is to signal you’re on the right side of a fight in which you are otherwise just a spectactor — then by tinting your Twitter avatar green and now by posting a shared slogan as your status update and then leaving it altered for the rest of the day. We could go back to 2008 and 2004 elections, or to any number of other charged moments, and find similar memes at play.

The question posed by this sort of thing is clear enough: should it count as ‘real’ activism or is it just a mass twitch  in the general direction of utopia, a show put on for the official media and for ourselves.

Any answer has  to start by considering it as quite literally a form of consumerism. It’s a full step further in that direction than the email activism of organizations like MoveOn, which rely on the recipient to take some sort of minimal action, like making a phone call, writing a protest email, signing a petition, which MoveOn transfers directly to its prearranged target, usually a professional decision maker. These older forms are carried onto Facebook as well, but they’re weaker on this platform, easier to ignore, and require different techniques to get them to work. A ’status update’ or a ‘tweet’ can superficially seem more democratic — after all, no institution is telling the user what to do. But in practice this ‘act’ is identical to the ‘choice’ of the market.

That our very existences on social networking sites are commodities is an often overlooked fact. Given an existence wholly circumscribed by a virtual marketplace, everything we do, everything we post, is potentially a commodity by virtue of its link to ‘us.’ In ‘viral activism,’ by reproducing a more or less homogeneous message (a ‘meme,’ one of the few instances where the word actually refers to something), a population makes itself available as a single commodity for use by others in exchange for  individual use of the same message as a ’status update’: an advertisement that promotes a certain identity to their ‘friends’ (and to themselves). The only difference between this and any other Facebook content is that this ‘mega-meme’ is produced ‘from the ground up.’

These are not simply semantic distinctions — they have consequences.  Virtual activists do not organize themselves in the way real activists do, i.e. form permanent or temporary political units such as parties, mobs, parades, whatever, directed toward a specific set of goals. Even when activists remain law-abiding their actions are intended to stage a confrontation, to disrespect boundaries that may not be acknowledged by the law. A social division is made, exchange relations dependent on certain forms of equivalence are foreclosed (i.e. politeness, personal space, a traffic intersection, etc.). As long as it’s part of a larger strategy from the beginning, this is true even of petition-signing. Virtual activists on the other hand are always responding to/initiating various types of interpolation from within an institutional setting (the site’s apparatus) that automatically neutralizes all it touches,  like ‘interactive’ television. A Facebook group is just a passive ‘tag,’ another identity accessory for the individual user and a commodity that passively awaits outside use (a social ad). As long as their virtual existence  is immanent with that institution (they remain members), all actions are wholly included within it, with zero remainder.

What are social ads good for? By aggregating the many status updates into a single product, they provide something for the bigger blogs and journalists to ‘report’ on (really just an outgrowth of tagging), and  from which a political meaning can be derived or invented. First and foremost they generate conversation, and since most of it will refer to Facebook if not occur on its platform they also indirectly generate more Facebook use and more prestige, a ’status update’ for Facebook itself. Whether or not any of this can ‘make a difference’ is dependent upon how these commodities are employed by others.

The effects of this latest capture of the social reflect how our tiny plots of spectacular real estate turn us into micro-celebrities, where even to contemplate ‘action’ forces us into a narcissistic obsession with our public image, no matter how inconsequential it may be. Celebreality shows and the higher profile of porn stars in recent years show us that has-beens and nobodies fighting for table scraps will play the game of recognition even more ferociously than Hollywood royalty. The public face of this private complex is when celebrities, politicians-as-celebrities, or now you-as-celebrity endorse certain causes, ultimately all responsibility rests on YOU to act, even as the possibilities for action of the relatively elite YOU being addressed (the YOU who can be expected to take Them seriously) are increasingly observed, micromanaged, routed into narrower and more regulated pathways.

A final comparison to opinion polling is helpful in getting at the ideological function of social activertising. Unlike polls, the opinions of users don’t appear as already existing truths, dependent on the work of experts on ‘real’ demographics, but those truths actively expressed. Where a poll is employed in speculation — what x group ‘really thinks’ at a given moment is valuable as evidence for what actions they might take in the future — a wave of status updates or green-tinted Twitter profiles appear to assert themselves as political facts. No research or fact-checking need be done to evaluate truth claims when the phenomena is just the free and unsolicited manifestation of truth, like votes or sales figures. These ‘actions’ thus merge the legitimacy of a poll with the immediacy of activism. Virtual activism is more real than statistics (which are ‘always’ rigged), more legitimate than protests (which are ‘always’ dangerous).

Jonathan Singer (see link above):

While the vast majority of the political organizing I see on Facebook tends to come from the same names — friends working in politics on a full time basis — what is remarkable here is that these status updates containing a strong and clear message in favor of healthcare reform are coming not only from the political community but also from those whose lives are not immersed in these fights. These are regular young people, all around the country, speaking out in favor of reform. This movement is impressive and surprising, and, at least from this vantage, quite newsworthy.

This is what everyone said about Iran, the rhetoric directing us to understand these movements as made up of “everyday” people, free of the supposed dangers and ‘biases’ of ‘professional’ activists. Of course there is a selection process for which ideas can ‘filter up’ from the social network ‘netroots’ and what kinds of users can do what that tends not to be acknowledged. This selection process is, broadly speaking, class-based.

Here is a great article on one example of how class manifests online, the great divide between Myspace and Facebook with some very illuminating (and horrifying) quotes from teenagers. Facebook has clearly won the PR battle, easy to do when the New York Times’ reporting staff and most of its readership is made up of Facebook users. Facebook is the appropriate platform for politics, just as Myspace is the appropriate platform for your ex’s rock band and various sex offenders. This doesn’t even count the selection process for who gets to be on the Internet to begin with. And yet, through the magic of social networking, it is the Facebook community which is quickly establishing itself in the 24-hour image universe as the new legal-utopian definition of ‘the people.’ The obvious impossibility of this fantasy doesn’t mean it won’t have certain effects.

For a demonstration, let’s put on some ruling class spectacles and look at some pictures. Isn’t this:

infinitely preferable to this?

See? You didn’t even have to think about it.

“I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.”

– SS Colonel Hans Landa

“As a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.”

– Laurence Bender

Every review I’ve read of Tarantino’s latest, mainstream or blog, takes it much too literally. No matter what one thinks of the film, to see all these earnest Jewish critics stiltedly commenting (in good faith, mind) on the film’s good or bad representation of WWII or the Holocaust, as if it were a statement from a major public intellectual that forced a reevaluation of established history, is both funny and painful. Under the logic of the public sphere — what Tarantino is really ‘exploiting’ — they are obliged, whether they want to or not, to come up with some sort of moral response to a meta-farcical action-adventure flick written and directed by a gauche white guy raised by a TV/VCR combo. Even Denby, who’s too smart to be drawn in, stops his critique at just this level, using the director’s immaturity, his arrested adolescence and nihilistic form of cinephilia as an escape clause.

I was quoted here as calling Basterds the “morally weightiest” of Tarantino’s films, and while I did say that (not that exact construction of course) it was only because I couldn’t think of anything better. As in the other four, ’something else’ does emerge from IB’s genre mashups and citation games, which I’ll get to. In the course of which I hope to point out two things that are often said of Tarantino but aren’t true: that his films are mechanically entertaining conceptual exercises (that is, non-ideological), and, corollary to the first, that his aesthetic concerns are immature (that is, uninterested in ’serious themes,’ out of touch with reality, etc.).

Comparing IB to other recent Jewish violent revenge fantasies (Munich and Defiance) as Goldberg does in the second link above (and Alex further comments on) is instructive only insofar as it helps us identify ‘the other’ genre the film employs along with the standard Tarantino palette of’60s and ’70s exploitation flicks. Its resemblances aren’t formal in this case but ideological. Munich and Defiance indulge in historical fantasies of Jewish action heroes meting out punishment to cowering fascists/terrorists and feeling kind of bad about it. Then in a classic ‘negation of the negation’ they frame the protagonists’ ‘awareness’ of their loss of humanity as still further evidence of their heroism and the sanctity of their mission. All of this is of course perfectly compatible with the fascist self-image. And ’serious’ American action films. And the comic books on which they’re based.

Admitting all of this is the first step to understanding what IB is up to.

‘SPOILERS’

The last chapter ends the film with three formally and narratively connected moments of ‘catharsis.’ The climax as a whole is, as in all of Tarantino’s ‘big moments,’ the result of multiple characters and storylines (each generated from different combinations of genre tropes) violently colliding with one another.

The first occurs via the film-within-a-film, the Nazi propaganda Stolz der Nation, at the premier screening for the German High Command and their special guests. Frederick Zoller is the star, playing himself at a sniper battle where he fought off a 300-man attack by himself from a ‘bird’s nest’ position on top of a bell tower. As we watch the lame, repetitive action, Zoller’s face lit up to look like a somewhat confused version of Wilhelm Meister, we get reaction shots of the elite Nazi audience: Hitler congratulates Goebbels on a job well done, almost bringing tears to the man’s eyes. Shot of Zoller taking aim, shot of an enemy tumbling down some stairs or out a window, Zoller’s reaction, close up on Hitler laughing like a kid. Etc.

The second occurs after two of the ‘Basterds,’ Donny and Omar, bust into the theater and start massacring the audience with tommy guns. The actor playing Donny is Eli Roth, better known as the director of Hostel, and the real-life director of the propaganda film that his character interrupts. Here the shot-reverse-shot combination from Stolz der Nation is repeated, minus the audience reaction shot: Donny shooting, Nazis dying, Omar shooting, Nazis dying, Donny shooting, Hitler disintegrating, etc. Every cut back to Donny zooms in a little closer — where Zoller was made to look noble, at times even reluctant, Donny looks like a savage animal.

This is a fairly simple relativizing gesture, only unusual because we’re seeing it in a Tarantino movie. The revenge plot that in at least some version runs through every film is here given its clearest formal expression. ‘Evil’ comes first, its subject (Zoller) the pathetic dupe of an ideology that never actually manifests in the film (no one ever says why they’re a Nazi). All we get are its signs, huge swastikas everywhere, Hitler and Goebbels as cackling archvillains. This is the pure or ideological form of ideology, which can only appear as a ridiculous cartoon. The Basterds’ formally identical act of vengeance is carried out by Jewish ‘others’ who are at the same time American, authorized by the state and educated by American movies and pop culture (Donny kills his victims with a baseball bat). They are dupes themselves, purely reactive, and not ‘humanized’ by good acting the way Tarantino’s characters usually are. The structural position left open for us is that formerly occupied by the Nazi cartoon audience, which allows us the privilege of ironic self-awareness, free to interpret this scene as public service, critique, whatever, without fear of emotional manipulation.

All characters appearing so far serve for the invisible audience as ‘idiots supposed to believe,’ buffoons who, through being cinematized, are permitted to unironically and unapologetically live out the cinematic fantasies in which Tarantino has been educating us over the course of his career. They are his version of the film critic’s horny, nihilistic, video-game-addicted violent teenagers, the ‘impressionable audience’ both public moralism and irony require to function.

The third moment comes at the end. The Basterds would not have succeeded if Landa, who instantly saw through their scheme, hadn’t made a deal with the American leadership to stay quiet in exchange for full pardon and a hero’s welcome in the U.S. But, rather than let Landa get off scot-free, thus rewriting history in his own favor (the rightful privilege of victors), the Basterd’s hillbilly (non-Jewish) leader Aldo Raine writes the truth back in, so to speak, by carving a swastika into Landa’s forehead. This is what he does to all Nazis he lets live, giving them, as he puts it, “a uniform you can’t take off.”

Where the Nazis and the Jewish Basterds are ideological dupes, Landa and Raine are not, and their showdown is verbal, far away from spectacular set-piece violence. Landa, thematically and visually linked to Sherlock Holmes (with his absurd Calabash pipe), plays the film’s plot like a chess master. That he’s every critic’s favorite character is not surprising. Raine, on the other hand, is a savage, part Apache even, whose M.O. includes the taking of Nazi scalps. He beats Landa not through Landa’s game of being smarter than the ideological rules by which others (think they) live, but by embodying his country’s ideology in its very arbitrariness. This is the film’s last surviving ethical ‘argument’: the Nazis aren’t Nazis because they’re evil, they’re evil because they’re Nazis. And as Raine scars Landa with this lesson Tarantino is also scarring us with it: after a disgusting close-up of the engraving accompanied by Landa’s screams, the final shot is from Landa’s POV, and the last line is Raine’s: “I think this just might be my masterpiece.”

Now this climactic moment for the film as a whole is also the anticlimactic resolution of its emotionally central narrative thread, which takes place entirely behind the scenes of the war. Its cathartic moment — the fourth — contains the deaths of Shoshanna and Zoller, survived by their two warring films going up in flames. Shoshanna, a Gallic Jew hunted by Landa, owns the cinema where Stolz der Nation premiers. Zoller arranges the whole thing because he’s infatuated with her. Her revenge plot, which runs parallel to the military one, involves trapping the Nazis in the auditorium and setting the theater’s archives on fire, while a reel of herself taunting her victims replaces the finale of Goebbel’s film — in American English, of course. Having only seen this once, I’m not sure if it’s suggested that Hitler & Co. could have escaped the theater if the Basterds hadn’t intervened. At the very least, the outcome of the their plot (via Landa’s betrayal) renders Shoshanna’s superfluous (even if the auditorium wasn’t barred, the High Command would still have died). Superfluous but beautiful, and the film’s only real tragedy. The Americans redeem her plan’s failure while her film, doubly as the ghostly image of her revenge and the setting and occasion for the depicted fantastical exercise in wish-fulfillment, redeems the war’s ugly and castrating imperfections.

IB is then alternately a deconstruction of and apologia for the pleasures of propaganda, which the film presents as a fundamentally American genre, as American as killing Nazis. The transcendent moment of cinema-love that comes with the Revenge of the (Shoshanna’s) Giant Face (the title of the final chapter) burning up on the screen is an expression of art for art’s sake appropriate to cinema: a work of art is a propaganda piece that becomes its own object by embracing the arbitrariness of its desire to be a work of art. It’s often been commented that IB is an unexpectedly European film. Most of the film is not in English, and much of its pleasure and tension come from language issues, an area in which the Americans are completely out of their element. But (just like in Kill Bill) they still win.

If one were to reduce IB to a Jameson-style historical allegory (is this the only Tarantino film where it’s possible to do this?), it would look something like this: a fading (feminized, civilized) Europe preserves its cinema’s beauty by recording its self-destruction, the arbitrariness of its fate, while a rising (masculine, half-savage) America appropriates its power by disregarding the logical (‘ethical’) consequences of its own arbitrariness. IB thus authorizes itself to take that extra, illegal step beyond historical accuracy and aestheticized self-destruction typically glorified by European art film. The first by killing Hitler, and the second by refusing to accept the film’s ‘rightful’ ending: the deaths of Zoller and Shoshanna and the escape of Landa. Here’s Tarantino:

“Now, when it came to writing this movie, naturally, I came across some of those roadblocks. And one of them was history itself. And I was more or less prepared to honor that. Until I came up actually against it. And I go, ‘no, I refuse!’. I’ve never done that before, and now is not the time to start. And what I mean by that is this, I just thought that my characters don’t know they’re part of history – history has not been written yet. They don’t know that there’s things that they can and can’t do. There’s no can and can’t, there’s only action and reaction.”

The film is run through with the sense that only an American film can do this, can master narrative causality by becoming the first among its slaves: though no onscreen American character really drives the action in any significant sense until the very end, no event in IB is allowed to pass that isn’t authorized by the U.S.A. Therefore only America, as the sovereign of cinema’s narrative logic, can exceed it, and deliver the audience its greatest possible pleasures. Cinematic pleasure is defined as American. Again, not because America is good, but because good is American. When other countries make a ‘fun’ or ‘crowd-pleasing’ film they can only do so within conditions determined by us. With IB, the ‘meaning’ of the Tarantinoverse is finally clear: the U.S. rules cinema, and the U.S. cannot die until cinema dies a second death.

Just trying to stay alive, yo. Nothing personal.

A while ago I posted a few things on horror. On my old blogspot (since deleted), I had a few posts on zombies as well as ‘torture porn,’ a moralizing term ostensibly used to refer to one of the more recent discernible horror subgenres, which includes films like Hostel, Saw, and the Hills Have Eyes remake, but which I think really indexes the discomfort experienced by critics who don’t ‘get’ the fixation on extreme violence and gore that seems so prevalent in horror in general over the past 10 years or so. Through the reactions of ‘decent people’ to the horror genre we are told once again that we live in a period defined by unprecedented nihilism and a pornographic relationship to human suffering.

The cultural debts owed by most of this decade’s horror are painfully obvious: the Golden Age of the 1970s, when the genre was infused with as much ’social commentary’ as fake blood and pigs’ guts. There still is that, but where before it was a barely conscious residue, as much product of critics and ‘the times’ as of the the auteurs themselves, now it’s a fading gesture, dispensed with by all but the most loyal. Joe Dante’s predictably clever zombie allegory Homecoming demonstrates the trade-offs involved in turning horror into a screed. Even Romero’s Land of the Dead, easily the most ‘radical’ zombie picture produced since Day of the Dead, creaks. One can appreciate the anti-capitalist message, but ranking it above the comparatively vapid 28 Days Later by any other criteria is pure nostalgia.

No, the legacy of ’70s horror (in the sense of its effect on later filmmakers) is not politics but reductionism. Zombies, ‘torture porn,’ even the sometimes more highbrow ‘new European extremity’ of Gaspar Noe, Alexandre Aja, Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont, etc., strip their horror scenarios of everything but the bare premise: the dead walk, a killer attacks at random, now deal with it. Watch.

That there is nothing for the protagonists to do but live or die, nothing to mean but success or failure, is no longer a mere precondition for a broader recontextualization of ideology but the entire narrative and ideological point. Saw speaks its philosophy out loud, from behind the mask of Jigsaw, its Tales From the Crypt-esque villain. “Most people are so ungrateful to be alive,” he tells the sole survivor of his Rube Goldberg execution scenarios, “but not you, not any more.” She thanks him later — her therapist (she ‘fails’ in a sequel when she begins to regard him as her cult leader). One is invited to pass judgment on the frat boy protagonist of Hostel or the stuffily perfect bourgeois family of Funny Games, but when they’re being tortured there is no one else to care about. Even more than the cartoonish ’slasher’ monsters (Michael Myers, Freddy, Jason), but for notable exceptions like Jigsaw, the new breed are absent non-entities, a-causal killers. In Funny Games the murdering duo are fictional tropes — in Hostel torture is just a business. The Dark Knight’s Joker,There Will Be Blood’s Plainview, and No Country For Old Men’s Chigurh all borrow the trope: the ’00s were the age of monsters without reason. To an audience that has learned how to sympathize with Norman Bates,  cheer on Michael Myers, and fall in love with Hannibal Lecter, it now (apparently) takes structural evil to convince and thrill (in the same way that supernatural and ‘psychological’ evil did in ages past). More than any sin they commit their power comes from defying the techniques of identification, giving the anarchic sense of having defied Hollywood itself.

Zombie stories, the great Robinsonades of the late 20th/early 21st centuries, differ from their 18th century ancestors in that they are unable to repress (or properly delay) the social, which inevitably appears as tragedy. In Night of the Living Dead Ben with his manly know-how is doing just fine surviving on his own. It’s only when people show up that things go wrong — the distrustful, strung-out, and frequently irrational group trapped inside the house with him, and the mass of rednecks who ‘accidentally’ shoot him down in the process of restoring civilization. The recent comic book series The Walking Dead (coming soon to a TV near you) takes its protagonist through a series of doomed attempts to restore the most banal forms of patriarchal ‘normality,’ all of which reduce to patriarchal authoritarianism before falling apart completely. Even Will Smith’s Last Man in I Am Legend, while alone for most of the film, is never portrayed as autonomous: he lives in and on the ruins of New York, driven half-crazy with loneliness (i.e. the scenes where he simulates the lost everyday with shop mannequins).

There are ‘left’ and ‘right’ versions of the zombie myth, but the message is always the same: the horrors wrought by humanity in extremis are always worse than the zombies.The absolute manichean split between human and zombie is insisted on only to be ’shockingly’ deconstructed, with all other differences either elided or made to look ridiculous by comparison. Like them, we must kill to live, even if there is no reason to go on (civilization is destroyed, etc.). We are them, they are us.

In horror anyone who cares about something other than the survival of themselves and their immediate allies is (or should be) dead. In that sense all horror is ’survival horror,’ the name for the genre of video games started by Alone in the Dark and established by Resident Evil. It’s a structural limit, perhaps the only formalism applicable to the genre as a whole, and which has permitted a wide variety of thematic material: Peeping Tom’s reflection of cinematic voyeurism, the weirdly seductive transformations of Cronenbergian body horror, Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism, the dark satire of Romero. But in more recent horror the structural limit is treated as a natural one, as the only true reality principle and therefore the only true ethical axiom. A horror story is more visceral, more ‘realistic,’ more ‘effective,’ the less it allows itself to go beyond the arbitrary necessities of its genre.

So two basic functional ‘types’ of monster can be distilled: 1) the monster who kills for no reason and 2) the ‘infected’ masses who, for no reason, must kill to live.

The victims, if they survive, usually leave stronger. For the spectator, the encouraged affects are awe at type 1 and pity for type 2. Perhaps counterintuitively, the idea that life is all that matters is usually denied. A good example from 28 Days Later:

Selena: I was thinking I was wrong.
Jim: About what?
Selena: All the death. All the shit. It doesn’t really mean anything to Frank and Hannah because… Well, she’s got a Dad and he’s got his daughter. So, I was wrong when I said that staying alive is as good as it gets.
Jim: See, that’s what I was thinking.
Selena: Was it?
Jim: Hmm. You stole my thought.
Selena: Sorry.
Jim: It’s okay. You keep it.

Not just life in terms of individual self-interest or of abstract ‘life’ in general (animal rights activists start the plague in 28 Days, an attempt to cure cancer brings on the zombie-vampire disease of I Am Legend), but the lives of one’s mates. Domestic hedonism is about the best that can be hoped for under conditions of zombie plague, and that’s alright.

This is the very strange, hospital-waiting-room-universe of a world where popular ideology has nothing left in its critical vocabulary except relativism. Capitalism’s collective fantasy space is finally bulldozed free of class, race, gender, etc. and yet even in the post-everything Utopia shit still doesn’t work! People are even worse! For without a social vocabulary, such a space is only imaginable after the flood, under conditions of absolute constraint. If science fiction can only imagine post-scarcity utopias, horror can only imagine happiness where scarcity is accepted as God. Horror’s current appointed task, beyond affirming the value of life through suffering, is pointing out that mirrors seem to be the only properly universal means ‘we’ have for representing things we happen not to understand.

Maybe in the early days of blogging the medium seemed poised to open new dimensions of creative expression, where all sorts of people could express anything from themselves to other stuff. In reality, human creativity is rarely marketable as such beyond the scope of individuals and small groups. It probably has to do with being a human myself, but from the proverbial birds-eye view people and their actions look less like unique liberated snowflakes and more like snow.

Now we know there is a finite number of genres available to the entry level blogger. What is less often acknowledged is that just like corporate news, each of these genres carry with them their own structural logic of representation, which manifests as their own built-in ’slant.’

To stay objective, we’ll avoid immediate issues (like health care) and pick some old news. Here’s a topical AP piece from last month:

UNITED NATIONS — Out of genocides past and Africa’s tumult a controversial but seldom-used diplomatic tool is emerging: The concept that the world has a “responsibility to protect” civilians against their own brutal governments.

At the U.N. General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pushed Tuesday for more intervention for the sake of protection.

“The question before us is not whether, but how,” Ban told the assembly, recalling two visits since 2006 to Kigali, Rwanda. The genocide memorial he saw there marks 100 days of horror in which more than half a million members of the Tutsi ethnic minority and moderates from the Hutu majority were slaughtered.

“It is high time to turn the promise of the ‘responsibility to protect’ into practice,” Ban said.

How does the blogosphere respond? I limit myself to blogs of the ‘left-of-center’ persuasion — whatever differences in ideology they may have are also differences in style. That, at least, is my working hypothesis.

The linkblog:

Unhappy Monday links:

- Think we’re out of the recession? Doug Henwood says think again.

- ‘Expert warns against advent of ‘Terminator’-style military robots.’ If you’re unemployed, don’t sell your Playstation — there may be hope for you yet:

The US currently has 200 Predators and 30 Reapers and next year alone will be spending US$5.5bn (€3.84bn) on unmanned combat vehicles.

At present these weapons are still operated remotely by humans sitting in front of computer screens. RAF pilots on secondment were among the more experienced controllers used by the US military, while others only had six weeks training, said Prof Sharkey. “If you’re good at computer games, you’re in,” he added.

Ender’s Game, here we come.

- In foreign policy news, the “responsibility to protect” doctrine has been getting more and more airtime. According to President Obama, there are “exceptional circumstances in which I think the need for international intervention becomes a moral imperative, the most obvious example being in a situation like Rwanda where genocide has occurred.”

As an on-again off-again pacifist, I’m deeply skeptical about any use of military force (particularly U.S.-led), but must confess not knowing nearly enough about the situation in Rwanda to make a sound judgment on that score.

- To compensate for your worries of U.N.-backed robot takeover, say hello to TOFU, “the ponderously eyebrowed robot fuzz owl with OLED eyes and some seriously rhythmic body jams.” Via (who else?) BoingBoing Gadgets.

The libblog:

I know we tend to stick to domestic politics around here, but if the Afghanistan/Iraq debacles have taught us anything, it’s that in this country we can’t afford to treat foreign and domestic policy as completely separate issues. The corporate media try to make it easy by chronically underreporting anything they can get away with, but this conditioned state of ignorance is unsustainable. The state of one affects the state of the other.

In the field of international relations, the issues of sovereignty and the right of other nations to intervene is a highly vexed issue. How do we legitimate ‘good’ uses of force, like Kosovo and Haiti, while preventing ‘bad’ ones, like Iraq? How do we reliably prevent acts of genocide, as in Rwanda or (arguably) Darfur, without risking the misuse of the same rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes?

An increasingly important potential solution is emerging, known as ‘responsibility to protect,’ or R2P.

[here follow about 1,500 words of analysis of policy documents with links to the original pdfs)

In conclusion, a renewed liberal international order is our only hope. There is a real difference between a liberal, internationalist hegemony and an imperial, nationalist one; in fact it's all the difference in the world. And we have the power to push our nation's policy and culture toward the one and away from the other. Not just the power, I would argue, but the duty: religious fundamentalism and the Bush White House's excessive response to it have shown us that universalism without tolerance is a recipe for global catastrophe.

I know I can't speak for all of you on this one. It's something that as liberals we need to discuss, and I urge you to get the ball rolling in the comments below. Keep it respectful, y'all.

The professional 'expert' as editorialist -- or someone who blogs under the assumption that their (usually well-respected) professional specialty gives them unique insight into events that often have little or nothing to do with that specialty:

...in my book, Twitsturbation Nation: How the Internet Generates Community, I made the argument that traditionalist notions of autocratic sovereignty would be the first major casualty of the Internet's production of society from below, one narcissistic avatar at a time. Today, even the biggest figures in international leadership are keenly aware that Web access is changing the way politics works at all levels, from policy to advocacy, from elections to revolution. "You cannot have Rwanda again," Gordon Brown said last month, "because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken. Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites."

I don't say this simply to brag about my foresight, but to make an important point about how attitudes change. Not long ago, the U.N. held a conference on the 'responsibility to protect,' a new doctrine that would set new standards for humanitarian intervention. In the past, even to attempt such a thing would have been immediately (and wrongheadedly) denounced as 'imperialism' by most liberals, and, post-Somalia, as sheer folly by realists. But we live in a different age. Life on the Internet is changing the way we think about the responsibility we have to one another, regardless of race, nationality, gender, or religious differences. How else could a stolen election in Iran generate such spontaneous support among the youth of its national enemy, the U.S.? It's true that many suffering people don't have access to the Internet, much less platforms like Twitter. But our imaginations have expanded to include them, and aid programs are not far behind. If this talk of responsibility sounds terribly old-fashioned, perhaps  one should draw comfort from another ancient adage: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The 'literary' editorialist -- or the blogger who, motivated by a frustrated ambition to be a novelist (successful novelists don't have time for 'real' blogging, see below), attempts a form of online commentary that is literature in its own right :

"May you live in interesting times." So goes the ancient Chinese proverb which is not a blessing, but a curse. And yet, even after the amused Western reader recognizes this, that 'interesting' retains its double edge. For we must admit that most suffering is not interesting whatsoever, even to the sufferers themselves. Suffering is common. Suffering is boring.

So it is almost surprising to the typical U.S.-ian solipsist (yours truly) to read about occasions like this, when serious policy thinkers debate in serious policy language the future of 'humanitarian intervention,' justifying the refocusing of the war machine with shocked, shocked descriptions of brutal, nay, genocidal violence still going on in darkest Africa. As if its persistence were in violation of some cosmic ordinance and not just the willfully impoverished cant of Empire, the Beast that rapes the already pillaged; as if the history of suffering had not already been printed in history books, academic journals, even (cough!) newspapers.

Though this is perhaps not so surprising: because politics is boring too.

And I, I struggle once again for inspiration, and the nerve (the blessed, unholy nerve) to write once again the already written.

The propagandist:

Another day, another insult to sanity:

[Ban Ki-Moon] advised limiting U.N. action under the ‘responsibility to protect’ concept to safeguarding civilians against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. He acknowledged the possibility of some nations “misusing these principles” as excuses to intervene unnecessarily, but said the challenge before the U.N. is to show that “sovereignty and responsibility are mutually reinforcing principles.”

This is the same old messianic language of imperial violence, rephrased to appeal to latte-sipping Hardt-Negrian shills. All states are on the verge of ‘failure,’ and can only be evaluated by external criteria. Never mind the totally negligible and contingent fact that some states are ‘too big to fail.’ People are suffering, dammit!

Far from a universal degradation of sovereignty, what this amounts to is the invisible justification of a few ueber-powerful states, based on two mutually defining concepts of ‘failure.’ Under this proposed division of governmental labor, a country like the U.S. has a ‘responsibility’ (entirely unrelated to its ‘excesses’) to ’supply’ military force to nations that, whether because sanctioned by the U.S. or on the wrong end of the international ‘free’ market, are unable or unwilling to prevent human rights abuses. ‘Success’ means either a) all nations magically achieve the status of liberal capitalist states with their militaries outsourced to the U.S./U.N. or b) the U.S./U.N. ‘intervenes’ and punishes the evildoers.

Disgusting.

I’d go into more depth, but Lenin’s Tomb has beaten me to the punch — make sure you check out these two typically awesome and well-researched posts.

One last thing: good to see folks getting disillusioned with Obama’s domestic politics, but his ideological misreading of Rwanda and tacit support for ‘R2P’ once again reinforces the obvious: that he’s just as firm a supporter of imperialist intervention as Bush, despite his pragmatic reservations.

Let’s keep fighting, y’all.

The Critical Theorist:

The following video clip illustrates a salient point I want to make about ‘the call’ to humanitarian intervention (periodically resurrected in mainstream political discourse despite frequent criticisms; for an example see the increasing popularity in policy circles of the odious ‘new’ doctrine of ‘responsibility to protect’) as a standard ideological gesture, in Jameson’s terminology an ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes.”

The sublime moment comes when we are told that “This is Reality” precisely because “We Have The Power To Change It.” The shift involved is purely anamorphotic, a shift internal to our own perspective: we cease to be the moral subject negatively threatened with a loss of reality in relation to the significance of its categorical claims and become this subject of transformative Power in relation to this (subsequent) representation of (the True) Reality alongside essentially Sublime objects. But this sudden shift in the phenomenological value of the image content becomes one of utopian positivity when and since it prominently features an anonymous, well-funded team of caring ‘peace core types.’ To follow Zizek’s reading of ideologically sublime objects, the paradox is hence that “pure difference” between the form of our moral subjectivity with its impossible categorical mandates and the real conditions of objective violence which underlie it as revealed by the ad’s negative perception, become the point of their greatest Truth, of their sublime Identity with ‘Reality’ through the supplement-object as the representation of the other ‘subject supposed to care.’ The starving African children become the Real of moral tragedy not because of the descriptive content their images are supposed to represent (that they are in fact in Africa which is in fact plagued by readily observable and structurally necessary economic and political instability) but precisely because they signify the point at which our categorical moral claims become meaningless, because Africa is the place in which ‘inalienable human rights’ become inapplicable in the face of the objective historical necessity of incomplete ‘development,’ and the ostensibly ’supplementary’ fiction of the ‘NGOther’ becomes essential.

This is the paradoxical moment of the Kantian sublime, in which “a[n enjoyable] representation arises where we would least expect it” of the Truth beneath our avowed categorical moral claims, at the point of the very impossibility of fully realizing our formal categorical moral subjectivization within the symbolic order. Following Lacan’s famous reading of Kant via Sade, we can say that this reveals the truly Sadean dimension of the Kantian moral law. Just as the Sadean fantasy imposes upon the subject the impossible pathological injunction to enjoy his victim’s sublime body without any regard for the limitations imposed upon it by real mortality, the Kantian categorical moral law is “the Real of an unconditional imperative which takes no regard for the limitations imposed upon us by reality—it is [a formally equivalent] impossible injunction.” Hence the subject is ‘freed’ from burden of its impossible demands through the presentation of this very impossibility, by submitting to the ad’s ‘irrational’ categorical imperative, and thus it only fully assumes this identity in a disavowed, ‘properly distanced’ manner, through the moral object supposed to care, the transcendentally ‘free’ subject of transformative Power whose ‘gear’ begins to fill the screen.  In this sense the sublime experience is, following Zizek, strictly one of false inter-activity: as our traumatic kernel of real-life impotence/passivity is transcended by the little other(qua imaginary subject supposed to care)’s enacted desire, our real-life activity becomes structurally equivocal with the enactment of this desire in the gaze of an impersonal, unconsciously assumed big Other.

The act of donation is hence properly a phenomenon of surplus jouissance, literally the enjoyment of sense, of the (material and hence significant) making of sense: ‘joui-sense’ is precisely this sublime experience of a signification who’s meaning is only truly known by the Other object-supplement (its imaginary referent) but is formally assumed by the subject as its ‘efficient’ cause. But from the very beginning of the ad we are already ‘sublimely’ subject to the obscene injunction to enjoy ‘our’ own subjective position precisely as a barred subject, as the contingent content of the enunciation of a categorical ‘You’ that perhaps also enjoys what has now come to be the simulacral myth of Michael Jackson-type innocence: one that survives despite being foreclosed from the formal Law as such. The realized injunction to donate is hence not only a ‘truly sincere’ investiture in the sublime meaning produced, but the assumption of this impossible-real objective presentation as a subjectively necessary condition for this ‘meaning’ to exist as the retroactively attributed Truth to ‘Your’ ‘real’ activity. Is this not the perfect analogue to injunctions of ‘international law’ and their justifications? The point is to realize that both ’support’ for any given ersatz ‘law’ devised in the interests of global capitalism’s elite oligarchs and individual donations to humanitarian NGOs are made effectively real for the subject only by passively making what is, in fact, a ‘purely symbolic’ gesture for the gaze of an assumed big Other, and that the sublime enjoyment we gather from our fundamentally passive ‘participation’ is that of producing a signification of this Other’s desire, of assuming the subjective role of an object-cause for this Other’s active enjoyment.

The hipster editorialist:

Yall. Starting to get annoyed seeing sOO many blogs and ‘articles’ about celebrities trying 2 ‘make a difference’ by applying their personal brands to ‘3rd world shitholes’ (i.e. Hotel Rwanda). I feel like ‘activism’ oriented vaycays have prior brand identity as what MSTRMers and meaningfulcore bros do in college over the summer to ‘find themselves.’ Feels ‘unfair’ for celebrities with private jets to make 10x of a difference in 1 weekend than u and me ever could in our entire lives.

It’s kinda weird how ur supposed to go somewhere where ppl are ‘less fortunate than u’ at some point in ur life. Whether it is Africa, New Orleans, Detroit, or rural Missouri, there are people who are less fortunate than ‘us’ every where. Just want to appreciate my family + personal social networks on the internet more than ever when I see people who are ’suffering’, ‘uneducated’, ‘hungry’, and ‘0% self-aware.’

Sort of feel bad that I dont ‘get’ ‘what the big deal is’ about Africa. Not sure why I’m supposed to care about ‘millions’ of ‘lil negroes’ who don’t add value to my lifestyle/product lines. It’s hard 2 integrate ‘giving a shit about the world’ with my post-chillwave personal brand. But there comes a time when every entity with a ‘public voice’ has to use their voice 4 good. I don’t know what cause I’m going to rally around, but it will probably be something tangible/meaningful in my ‘personal life.’

How bout yall?
Do yall feel like Africa should be ‘first on the agenda’ for 2k10?
Does ‘the West’ (via Barry Obama) have a ‘responsibility 2 protect’ ‘troubled regions’?
Any ideas 4 how 2 spread chill values like ‘human rights’ and access to sweet social networks to places where ‘folks can’t read’ and/or vote?
Should ppl just ‘mind their own damn business’?

The self-promoter – all blogs are fundamentally tools for self-promotion. But some bloggers are of such elite status that they don’t have time for anything else. This status can’t be gained purely through blogging, only by taking advantage of the blog’s effect on one’s career. The struggling novelist publishes with Harper Collins. The professional editorialist begins to appear on TV. Etc. While sometimes difficult to tell apart from the linkblog, the promoter’’s slightly higher ratio of self-disclosure (treating the blog literally as an ‘online journal’)  is one sign that they are in fact of two distinct species — celebrities and normals. It is at any rate the final stage of evolution for all blogs:

This morning I woke up to this outside my window. Ah, Brazil. How I loathe to leave thee.

- Launch party for the new book next Friday at the Hive. Open bar after my reading. I’ll see you there.

- Interview up at DesignBlog.

- My good friends Ted Brand and Sylvie are performing tonight at the Pinhook. Mp3s available here. I (obviously) can’t make it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Show some love!

- Thanks to Kamau for bringing this link to my attention: some interesting debates going on in the U.N. about international responsibility post-Rwanda. Speaking of which, donate money to this site.

God bless.

If I had to pick one feature of the development of minstrel-type performance from the past 30 years as the most pivotal, it would have to be the spectacularization of their audience. The white working-class demographic of original minstrelsy served as the basis for an entertainment that simultaneously redirected proletarian ressentiment toward racial stereotypes and appropriated/celebrated the racial other’s folk culture. The minstrel performer produced a fraudulent image of the black, Chinaman, etc. as a fraudulent citizen. The effect was the same regardless of whether the performer was racially black, Asian, etc. or not, though this of course did not negate whatever power was gained for individuals within these racial groups (or the group as a whole) by exploiting the minstrel images.

Today the screen includes the stage along with the whole theatre; and on to the town, state, and region. This allows the middle to upper middle class to join in the fun, albeit on different terms. Only natural that they consist of ways to avoid getting one’s hands dirty, of establishing proper distances. We’re seeing the gradual decline of the paternalistic standpoint of ‘learning about the other’s authentic culture’ (already a form of detachment from supposedly ‘direct’ or obscene pleasure) that was still present in the early years of gangsta rap. The last vestiges of those expectations are now reserved for representations of poor brown people and ‘the (vanishing, white) working class,’ and are more often the province of the documentary than entertainment. It is poverty and suffering, not culture, that truly authenticates today. Borat, for example, proved that 300 million dollars worth of Western audiences don’t give a shit about the indigenous culture of Kazakhstan. As soon as we know it’s poor, white, and backwater, we think we know all we need to.

Today, middle class liberals are not after authenticity from the minstrel show, but the patina of sophistication that comes from being in on every joke. The appreciation of skill is wholly concentrated on the performer, and wholly disassociated from the role. The minstrel character is talentless, whereas the performer’s skill is displayed by drawing out reactions from rubes which confirm that they are in fact rubes, and by transgressing (thereby reproducing) the laws of ‘political correctness.’ With Borat/Bruno/Zizek, the central minstrel figure is an obvious cliche — the joke the knowing audience is supposed to ‘get’ — even as it is the one we have to be taught: we are presumed to know nothing about Kazakhstan or Slovenia; we are presumed to find Bruno’s queer diva shtick outdated; we’re told how to find them funny. The on-screen targets of the ’satire’ (various species of dumb whites, usually, though in Bruno there’s an episode with overly-sensitive blacks) are also reduced to stereotypes: these are the ones we are presumed to accept. A vision of a ‘real America’ is assembled via these performances. It is just as dumb, ugly, racist, arrogant, and fradulent as anyone else who aspires to what we’ve rather arrogantly branded The American Dream, and inferior to anyone who happens to be watching.