the dream of safety

From the James Baldwin archives - a note to his brother David

2012-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

"The definition of the word, repetition - which is the key to music and the key to all that we call Art - has nothing to do with what the Western world imagines itself to be saying when they use this word. The sound is repeated because it was not heard the first time. The drummer hopes to make not himself but you heard."

Picture of the day

2012-01-13T20:07:00.000-08:00

Sculp(IT)

2011-11-08T14:13:00.000-08:00

The municipal government of Antwerp was happy to let this young couple use a gap between two buildings in the red light district as a home and office. Some people say that this gap was created by a firebomb thrown by a gang member. The city, in any case, was desperate for development in this area and as a result allowed the couple [whose firm is named Sculp(IT)] to bypass a great number of architectural regulations in order to design the building exactly the way they intended.

It struck me that their intention was to avoid the first-wave-of-gentrification architecture that prevails: a proliferation of fences, barbed wire, cameras, etc. The bottom window is also the front door.

Wouldn't you like a rooftop bathtub?

The thesis statement of the building is that there ought to be no problem with an extreme collision of the public and private. The local newspapers call them the exhibitionism artists. Since this is the red light district (and Belgium), the idea that neighbors might be offended by the nudity of bathers on a roof is absurd. Since the couple also work together as a firm, they place their office directly beneath their bedroom. And, most bizarrely, their toilet and shower is next to the bed:

2.4m wide, 5.5m deep.

2011-10-13T01:18:00.001-07:00

“They’re all broken when you get them.”

- My Grandma, to my aunt, about husbands

On my cousin and her husband

2011-09-17T23:22:00.001-07:00

You will both become more beautiful as you get older

Because you both have gestures, and someone who has gestures has beauty

On one of my uncles

2011-09-17T23:20:00.000-07:00

Either I'm a human and he's a robot

Or he's a human and I'm an alien

2011-09-16T21:50:00.001-07:00

Tikkun Olam, an old untranslatable Hebrew phrase.

It could be translated as:

To establish a world.

To fix what is broken.

or,

To tend to eternity.

The Double Bind

2011-09-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

Gregory Bateson, who influenced Felix Guattari, used the idea of the double bind as a potential cause for schizophrenia. It goes like this, apparently:

'Grown-up-in-authority to child: "Speak when you're spoken to" and "Don't talk back!"
These phrases have such time-honoured status that the contradiction between them is rarely perceived: If the child speaks when spoken to then he cannot avoid answering back. If he does not answer back then he fails to speak when spoken to. Whatever the child does he is always in the wrong.'

The winter of our discontent

2011-09-06T02:12:00.000-07:00

Written August 9th, 2011

It's strange to live in a place with ongoing political instability when that place is a place, like London, which is known for its safety and predictability. The importance of word of mouth grows by leaps and bounds as the media struggles along with the police. Watching a given few minutes of the live news updates gives you a palpable sense that the media is confused and vague, stammering, playing videos they found on Twitter or Facebook that are a couple of days old, interviewing a myriad of people, who, with the exception of a few voices, Darcus Howe, Nina Power, and Ken Livingstone among them, condemn the general situation in a vanishingly narrow variety of ways.

Some people are angry and rude during this time, some are far more relaxed than usual. There are all kinds of emotional responses. The overwhelming sensation is one of dislocation, a rumbling tremor or a sociopolitical earthquake, something beneath the surface which is being released. That surface is the image of a society of propriety, a society too proper to suffer from any illegal relocations of private property on a massive scale, what David Cameron famously called a "Big Society,” the most civil in the world. What lies beneath is not easy to name, but it has something to do with what has always been the subterranean, occluded engine of capitalism: the ignored, who by virtue of their condition both make possible and mark the impossibility of a society which profits from its capacity to beat them down, to attempt to convince them that their oppression is as natural and as just as the stars in the sky. The commentators have been using the word "monsters" to describe the youths, along with other epithets like "idiots" and "morons" (yet the term "anarchist" seems to be sidelined, seemingly reserved for the student [mostly middle class, mostly white] protestors earlier this year).

Certainly there are condemnable things that have been done by rioters, as in any situation when law is not enforced, such as the deaths in Birmingham and the people who lost their homes, as well as locally-owned business which were raided. But one must also inquire as to the long-term effect of chain stores like Curry's (The UK equivalent of Best Buy), Foot Locker, and Tesco (which owns Fresh & Easy and has a horrific labor relations record) on the poorest neighborhoods, the places where the riots first "kicked off." Poor neighborhoods like Hackney, Tottenham, and Peckham, Livingstone said on BBC, are both the same ones that have suffered the greatest public services cuts as well as the ones which are most occupied by massive, impersonal flourescent chain stores which regularly squash labor rights and pay minimum wage, maintaining high employee turnover as a way to keep afloat. As Dr Sofia Himmelblau wrote just now, "It is no coincidence that the primary target of rioters, despite a media-narrative keen to play up the social impact of these events on small retailers, was large retail warehouse stores that cling parasitically to neighbourhoods at the periphery of inner cities."

In the media, the "critical" attention is focused on a false debate, between condemning and condoning the actions of the youths. My flatmates disagree with me that this debate is false--they tell me that my refusal to engage with it is a kind of indifference or extremism, but I call it a false debate because there is really one side to it. That is to say, not a single public figure has come out in explicit support of the participants in the riots: even Darcus Howe, who was treated like a rioter himself by the BBC presenter because he tried to place it in the context of racial profiling and police brutality, condemned the riots from the beginning. One rapper from Peckham tweeted to his followers on Saturday that they should loot, perhaps sarcastically, and then deleted his twitter account because he was worried that the police, who already try to shut down each of his concerts, would punish him for it. The only public viewpoint lies within the boundaries of unequivocal condemnation, and the monopoly of opinion is such that those who try to explain the riots by placing them in context, just like figures who tried to place the 9/11 attacks in context, are either shouted down or ignored.

A major difference that may be hard to imagine for an American is the racial complexity of the situation. The UK is not segregated in the same way as the United States. While many social spaces are clearly white, there are a considerable number of so-called white people who live in city slums, which is quite different from a city like San Francisco or Oakland. The truth is that these youth are not all black but are to varying degrees responding to the way in which the police department treats both blacks and the poor, having killed more than 333 people in police custody since 1998. I say "blacks and the poor" because in a surreptitious way blackness stands in for poverty in the logics of neoliberalism, in the sense that people like Smiley Culture who were not or were no longer poor were still killed by the police with no government consequences. We cannot say that whites have not suffered from the climate of police terror, but we can safely say that wealthy whites (i.e. those millionaires who populate the cabinet and who run the country) have not found themselves in the conditions of pressure that these youth deal with every day, of which police terror is the most bare and hypocritical but not necessarily the worst. The conditions of pressure which led hordes of people, not merely youth and not merely black, to take what was not legally theirs were many and varied but have to do, broadly, with growing austerity measures designed to line the pockets of people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron and, in a bizarre "libertarian" paternalistic logic, to "motivate" them to be entrepreneurs by denying them any opportunities.

An American friend of mine just told me that her Dad didn't believe there were riots in London. This says quite a bit about the American perception of London but equally it might say something about London itself. On the one hand, why is it that Americans tend to imagine London as the space north of the Thames and south of Kilburn, west of Hackney, which is the most white and expensive part of the city? On the other hand, how does this completely false perception influence the climate of exasperation which led to the revolts?

Segregation Today

2011-09-01T01:28:00.000-07:00

It's often said that the most segregated place is the church on Sunday morning. And maybe the second most segregated place is a literary or intellectual event. I find that book signings and lectures are almost always that way. So I do my best not to appear at segregated events.

- John Edgar Wideman

Giorgio Agamben: What Is A Commandment?

2011-08-31T19:08:00.000-07:00

March 2011

The Greek Arkhe contains a paradox: it means both beginning and commandment (chiefhood, order) simultaneousl

Archon is Greek for “main authority”
In the Bible, God created man and earth through the commandment

o A word which is stated in the beginning can only be a commandment, an imperative

o The translation, thus, should have been ‘in the commandment was the word,’ not ‘in the beginning was the word’

o The beginning is always also the commandment

· Arkhos, etymologically, means both chief and anus
· The origin never ceases beginning, governing and commanding. If it stopped, the world would collapse, because government must be a continuous re-creation of the world
· The German Anfang can never be a past—the beginning is always present
· An epoch has always been sent by an Arkhe
· In Derrida, the origin is neutralized while the commandment is maintained in the form of a pure injunction
· Philosophically, there has hardly been any serious meditation on commandment
· Power is not defined by its capacity to be obeyed but by its capacity to give commandment
· Aristotle presents us with a fundamental partition, which is the origin of the general disregard, in philosophy, for commandment. He divides language into apophantic and non-apophantic. Non-apophantic language is that which falls outside of the categorization of truth and falsehood, such as prayer. Such a discourse is disregarded by Aristotle because he said it does not manifest anything.
· This movement of disregarding non-apophantic discourse decided the history of logic
· Commandment was, thus, confined to the moral sphere and made to be seen as an act of will
· An example of a commandment is when somebody says, “Walk!” This utterance says nothing of no one. It does not describe a state of things.
· The commandment is valid by its very utterance and does not refer to something existing. It is not an “is” but an “ought.”

o Sein and Sollen is the binary upon which Kant based his moral theory

· Morphologically, the imperative could be the primitive form of the verb
· Benveniste criticized Austin’s opinion of the imperative, saying that it has no reference in the world—it is, rather, the “naked semantic code” of the verb without reference or denotation
· There is a split between the ontology of assertion (Gr. este) and the ontology of commandment (Gr. esto)

o The former governs science and philosophy. The latter governs law, religion, and magic, which were initially indistinguishable from one another

· Western ontology is a double (bipolar) machine. The ontology of the esto gradually is becoming more important
· In the esto, language is constantly in the imperative—to build a whole world in the form of a commandment

o In the West, oddly enough, one prays in the form of a commandment to God

· Paul said to the Hebrews that faith is the hypostasis (substance) in which hoped-for things exist
· In Austin, commandment is a speech act—the speech act realizes itself through its enunciation

o This marks a magic layer to language which linguists failed to explain

· The distinction of locutionary and illocutionary speech corresponds to the bifurcation of the Western ontological machine
· The centrality of the commandment is eroding and overcoming the descriptive, in a sort of “return of the repressed” of the commandment ontology
· In today’s culture, commandments are usually disguised as advice, suggestion, advertisement, question, so that people fail to recognize the commandment as such. This is especially relevant to politics. “the stupidity of the modern citizen is without limit.”

o Therefore, we tend to think in terms of the assertion when in fact the non-apophantic is in control

· Commandment is explained as an act of will or volition. Unfortunately, this is to explain something obscure with something even more obscure—“only crazy people can give a definition of will.” Nietzsche explains will as commandment itself.
· To will, in Nietzsche, is to be capable
· Philosophy is “an attempt to give a meaning to empty modal verbs and to graft one onto another”
· Kant wrote that “Man muss Wollen Konnen,” which is almost impossible to translate, but it would be something like “Man must can will.” This is an almost insane, absurd foundation of his moral theory and it marks the impossibility of ethics in our time. For him, ethics can only have the form of a commandment. When one says “I can,” one means, “I will myself to obey.”
· The concept of will was introduced to check and limit potentiality
· Theology has a fundamental problem of divine omnipotence. Could God undo the past? This became a theological question of favour

o Debates on this question fill thousands of pages of 11^th-14^th century texts

· The solution became to distinguish between absolute potential (in which God can do anything) from ordinary potential (in which God can only do what he has decided to do)
· Will, therefore, limited and controlled potentiality

Q&A:

· We should open up a space for a third ontology in the machine, one which is neither apophantic nor non-apophantic
· Paul said that the messiah is the making-inoperative of the commanded law
· “I never give solutions. The solution must come from the neutralization of the dichotomy you have to cope with”
· “Kant’s ethics is just an incredible mistake. It cannot be saved. Ethics cannot have the form of a commandment.”
· Paul: “Languages will end, but love will remain.”

James Baldwin's Meditation on the Chromatics of Risk

2011-08-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

From his most underrated, and last, work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen:

"It is time to realize that Europe--the West--which, out of an unspeakable poverty, created the delusion of color, has always depended on Black tribal divisions in order to divide and rule! In this endeavor, they have quite overlooked and forgotten the juggernaut of their tribal divisions, and nothing is more dangerous than to have one's history, relentlessly pursuing, at one's back. Georgia began as a convict colony and all the waste and terror and hope of love and life and joy and fear of death and dreams of everlasting life were loaded onto that beast of burden, the Black--the eye of the beholder!--and, in that dark face, that warm and inescapable presence, the orphan of the Old World saw, every hour of every day, all that he longed to be and hoped that he would never become. For to dare to hope to become--to dare to trust the changing light--is to surrender the dream of safety. It means doing one's utmost not to hide from the question perpetually in the eyes of one's lovers or one's children. It means accepting that those who love you (and those who do not love you) see you far better than you will ever see yourself. It means accepting the terms of the contract that you signed at birth, the master copy of which contract is in the vaults of Death. These ruthless terms, it seems to me, make love and life and freedom real: whoever fears to die also fears to live. Whoever fears to die also imagines--must imagine--that another can die in his place; hence, the compulsive hacking off of the Black/black man's sex, and the enforced sterilization of Black/black women. The dream of safety can reach culmination or climax only in the nightmare orgasm of genocide (102)."

In this excerpt, Baldwin begins to describe the indescribable, or make public that which was condemned to privacy: lynchings, castrations, forced sterilizations--genocide, perpetrated as a matter of programmatic necessity against not only the descendents of slaves but also American Indians. This kind of programming is written, Baldwin implies, as the cost of safety: in his short story "Going to Meet the Man," the white main character, a Southern sheriff, believes in the terrible cost of his duty. The rhetorics of safety are inseparable from the metaphorical meaning of whiteness, which is finally one with its meaning in general: purity, clarity, lightness. At the same time, the black (or native, or nonwhite) body becomes the "inescapable presence" upon which is written the violent terms of the "agreement" which was never consensual...as Hortense Spillers writes, the black body

"brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless...it is as if neither time nor history shows movement...I would call it the Great Long National Shame...We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks mightbreak our bones, but words will most certainly kill us. ("Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Diacritics, 1987, 68)."

So the "Great Long National Shame," the truth of sexual gratification in and as theft, castration, allowing another to die in your place, is also the Great Secret Pride, the great open hidden secret, a wink and a nod, a slap on the back, fuel for the fire of the great projects of hierarchical establishment. This is why the women in Bill Duke's documentary on dark-skinned women say that they, in contradistinction to their lighter counterparts, tend to be seen as throwaway women, as flings or one-night stands, useful only for sex and not for marrying or commitment: the most disturbing thing about "Black is beautiful" is that Thomas Jefferson, against his own will and perhaps without his knowing, believed it, preferred Sally Hemings to his own wife, because there was something inescapable about the power relation indexed by color. Color became a crucial kind of therapy, as Derek Jarman would say, a means of assuaging one's fear and a sign which marked infinite love, infinite presence, a constellation which guided the nihilistic and psychotic drives and which held them as a reservoir.

The black children in my "multicultural," wealthy, cosmopolitan, liberal elementary school were those who bore the greatest number of epithets and were most ostracized for reasons which the white kids kept secret even from themselves: they never said, "we are teasing them because they are black," as we learned about Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in second grade...somehow, however, certain children were pushed to the margins of the circle, obsessively taunted. Fred Moten argues, against Hannah Arendt's simple, "commonsense" idea of American racism as the rejection of the unwanted black, that in fact the black is the obsessively desired. How else do we explain the massive influence of a figure like Quincy Jones, a form like jazz or rock and roll, a disparate idiom like ebonics, upon the world?

The idea of the open secret: the open secret of gratuitous violence, to use Saidiya Hartman's notion, against the black body, borne out in the cases of Oscar Grant and Mark Duggan, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney, Tupac Shakur, Sarah Baartman, and Malcolm X, is inseparable from and in turn creates other secrets. Yet these secrets, these privatizations of space and language, are created for different reasons: the white secrets, "little white lies," (like the myth of whiteness itself) are created because people choose not to confront their own pasts--other secrets are made as improvised means to survive beneath an empire of conceits. As Baldwin put it in A Rap on Race:

Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand--or sleight-of-hand--by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary--without the faintest notion of what it really means--the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.

Paul Gilroy speaks on the riots, August 2011, Tottenham, North London

2011-08-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

http://vibrationsmusic.com/2009/04/27/paul-gilroy/

[Winston Silcott in his introduction, remarked that if London had a better welfare state like Sweden, the riots may not have occurred]

Gilroy: I don't want us to get too romantic about Scandinavia...[applause]. The last time I was in Malmö there was a laser sniper shooting at people of colour in the streets.

I want to say a few things in solidarity with the people who have suffered, the families including the family of Mark Duggan who have lost so much. I was sitting in Highbury magistrate's court this morning, watching the magistrate giving people who had no criminal record months and months before their case would even be heard. And those young people, some of whom were not with their families but were on their own, could not have been defended successfully even by someone like Michael Mansfield. It's a sham what's going on down there. For people who've been charged with violent disorder, 2 out of 3 of them have been remanded in custody, and that is a scandal, not justice.

We've heard a lot of surprise from our political leaders who say that they didn't know this was coming. I use Twitter, and I hope you do too, because it's a useful form of news now that we don't watch TV so much. One person I follow on Twitter is the leader of the police federation. The leader of the police federation has been saying consistently that he went to see [Home Secretary] Theresa May in the spring of this year, but before the student protests started. He went to see her after the election and he told her there would be problems, and she dismissed him and said he was a scaremonger. So I think we should explore this question of what does it mean to pretend you didn't know something was going to happen when you did know.

The question is supposed to be was there politics in this rioting, or was it just a cry for help or a cry for things. And I think the question shouldn't be was there politics in this rioting and looting, but is there politics in this country? Because when you have three parties who are saying the same thing...[applause] there's no politics in Britain. There's a kind of entertainment, there's a bit of theatre, which is delivered to people, in the face of what is a desperate situation, which can only get worse, and can't just be understood from a local perspective. It can't just be understood from what's going on here--we need to think about what's going on in other parts of the world which the crisis has touched.

Stafford Scott wrote a very lucid and a very brilliant analysis of what was going on in the paper, and he looked a variety of indicators to try to understand what's going on around us here: unemployment numbers, school exclusion numbers, stop and search numbers...In terms of these things, the numbers are as bad as or worse than they were thirty years ago.

So the temptation is to say it's the same game as it was thirty years ago, or twenty-five years ago, and it isn't the same game. For instance, the police admitted that they've done a hundred thousand searches under the new terrorism legislation, and of those hundred thousand searches not one, not one, led to an arrest under the terrorism legislation! So I think we need to remember that the game has changed.

And in 1981 there was a sense that they knew there were particular areas of London that were places which could blow up at any time, and the solution was a very complex thing, which involved soft policing, and schools, etcetera. And what we've seen since 1981 is the militarization of that structure. The criminal justice system and places of incarceration have become blacker and browner places--the groups of people incarcerated in this country is a disproportionate phenomenon.

To me that data doesn't show, doesn't suggest, that the people, our people, are any more criminal than anyone else. What it suggests to me is that they've been subjected to processes of criminalization.

Now, in 1981, you could talk about racism. A judge was given the job of seeing how the events of 1981 [riots in Brixton, Handsworth, Leeds and Liverpool] developed. He said he had to discuss the question of racism in his report. Of course, he said "what institutional racism?"--I'm not a fan of his; I'm just saying, he had to address that question. And now we're in a situation where everyone says, "oh, racism? That's done with. That was before." And I don't think that that's the case.

When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities, the generation who came of age during that time thirty years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They've privatized that movement, and they've sold their services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers. They've sold their services to the police, they've sold them to the army, they've sold them to the corporate world...go to some of their websites and you'll see how proud they are of their clients. And that means that, in many areas, the loss of experience, the loss of the imagination is a massive phenomenon. So that the young people in the courts today don't have a defence campaign. They don't have one yet, but I hope that one will develop.

So a lot of that leadership has been channeled into the local government, and has formed a kind of "consultariat." And if you want to understand what that means, you have to look at places like South Africa, where, in the process after the end of apartheid, a whole layer of militants, a whole layer of people went over, and they got their pensions, and they sold this, and they sold that, because the government, in changing that society, thought that having a Black middle class was going to be the way to do it. Well, that's not the way it's going to work here. [applause]

That privatization is also a privatization of the mind. Because in 1981 there were no computers, there were no mobile phones, so people didn't have all of that digital distraction. There was no porn saturating the world that young people move through, there was no place to upload your videos to. These are big changes. They point us to something that's important in understanding the difference between then and now.

The difference between 1981 and now is that the relationship between information and power has been changed, and our tactics for understanding our defence of our communities have to take those changes into account. And that means that we have to think very carefully about how we engage with the media. I'm very happy that there are people here who are independent distributors of information and news, who are circulating what goes on here and circulating interpretations of what's happened in this country. We have to get it to people outside of our country--we have to internationalize it. We have to think about how technology can work for us. And media is not something transparent.

Because what happens in the digitalization of media and privatization is the contraction and the impoverishment of our media. People talk about "dumbing down"--it's not just about dumbing down--it's something different than that. And that means that there's a much tighter control over what can be said.

And that technology which is so different from in 1981 is also part of what I'd like to call, tonight, a securitocracy, ruling us through security. And that means the DNA in your bodies, in your mouths, in DNA swabs, the CCTV cameras that are all around us here...And, and this is another interesting feature of last week, the way the spin operation works. The media, owned by people like Murdoch, have a 'golden hour' after the story breaks, in which they can fix the story, and then that fixed story grows, like a snowball rolling downhill.

What we need to understand is that this doesn't happen by accident. These things are techniques for making information meaningful, and we need to learn from them.

One of the other differences between now and 30 years ago, now and 25 years ago, is that the riots are no longer just a black-and-white story. It's a story that's complicated by all kinds of changes in our cities and our communities. It's a story that's been complicated by the development of political Islam in our communities--I mean, had it not been Ramadan, who knows what different kinds of events would have unfolded.

And it's no longer a story which can be explained only by reference to a Caribbean history, because the majority of the Black population now in our country are people of African descent, with a range of different experiences, a range of different stories and reasons for being here. We have a number of small business owners, shopkeepers, many of whom are immigrants who have arrived from somewhere else, and they're taking the position that people who own shops have always taken, and it's no surprise for them to be calling for vigilantism and other things to protect their property.

Our situation is made complex in a different sense by the presence of people from Eastern Europe. I mean, the woman who jumped out of the window in Croydon--she'd come from Poland to work in Poundland, because that was a better life for her. Imagine what that means, to come from Poland to work in Poundland, for minimum wage, searching for a better life.

So we have to find some way to recognize those differences too.

The government wants to introduce new laws to criminalize the wearing of masks. The only people who really get away with wearing masks in our society right now is the territorial support group [of the Met police]. [applause] I don't hear Jack Straw saying, "I can't see their faces." [laughter] So that suggests to me that there's a double standard at work here, and we need to pressure that.

And sure, there are gangs around in London, but this is not about gangs. And I think Gary's made a good point about the United States. We've been talking about poverty, and one of the worst forms of poverty that's shaped our situation is poverty of the imagination. And what happens in this country, and this is something that many of us in our communities share with [Conservative Prime Minister] David Cameron, whether we like it or not. When we feel the impact of our poverty of the imagination, we reach for what we think is the future, and that's always the United States of America.

I never thought that in a public forum I would agree with Sir Hugh Orde, the police chief of Northern Ireland, but he would say clearly that is not a situation that is going to be eliminated by the infiltration of American techniques. And I think he's right. I think we should remember that before we think that the Coach Carter scenario is part of our future and the solution to the problems faced by our young people. [applause]

If we go down that road, we're headed toward a society that's run on the basis of mass imprisonment. And that's not just about making the prisons bigger and fuller, making them engines for making money for private corporations, but it's also about turning your schools into prisons, and turning your streets into prisons, and turning your community into something that's much more like a prison. And we do not want that society based on mass imprisonment. That's not our future. We are not Americans, we are not Americans.

Lastly, I'd suggest that I think we need to put David Lammy under some pressure. [applause] In the same way, we should put the media under some pressure for controlling our information, and not just go running to Sky News and BBC. We need to put our political representatives under some pressure. I live in Finsbury Park, not too far from Tottenham, so I know where David Lammy lives. He's something of an outside agitator in your community. [laughter]

The last thing I want to say is that in 1981 and 1985 we knew we were dealing with a system. We understood the interconnecting parts. When I talk about the poverty of the imagination, I mean that we are thinking like people who approach these things through the lens of a privatized world. We only think of these things as individuals, and we don't see them as connected. The last week has been an amazing class, a primer, to give us the opportunity to understand how these things function today. You remember that party they all had, in the Cotswolds...and they were all there, the Milibands were there, the Labour people were there, the TV people were there (not the ones from David Starkey-land but the ones from Channel Four News), and they were all there together, and they're telling you something when they all congregate like that.

They're telling you that they're a class. And they think and act and conduct themselves like a class. They chat to each other, they marry each other, they go to the same places...And if we want to act as a body, if we want to act in concert, we have to learn something from the way they conduct themselves, even as we challenge what they do.

So the pieces I can see in this system, the role of information, of policing, of deprivation, of inequality...And we need to clarify that we have the resources we need in our community--we just need to use them in a different way. Thank you.

2011-08-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

Not authenticity in the sense of a total act, or a meditative, natural state...not authenticity in any sense that could be called authenticity. Because as soon as it becomes an effort toward authenticity it sheds any sense of its own truthfulness.

As the UK burns

2011-08-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

"The reason the police are so hated in the ghetto is...because you don't have to be more than fifteen years old at the very most to realize that the cop is not there to protect you but to protect Mr. Charlie's property. And that makes his presence absolutely intolerable."

"When I was growing up it was...yes, it's true, there was a kind of resignation. The whole style came out of a certain kind of resignation which is gone forever...Even people who got educated realized that they were still in a trap. I knew too many people who had been to college who were shuffling around with garbage cans to be fooled about what education would do. And now it is very different. It is very different because the image that black people have of themselves has changed. It is utterly changed, and it has changed because of objective reasons. It has changed because the world has changed. It has changed because of what we have seen on television: black leaders, black riots, white liars. It has changed because the power of white people to control my mind--black minds--has been broken, and that is a very important shift. It is perfectly true: no one growing up now has before them the vista that I had when I was growing up. Though that, paradoxically, increases the poverty and rage, doesn't it?"

"If I were young I would find myself with no morals."

All quotations taken from A Rap on Race (1970).

2011-08-11T08:17:00.001-07:00

It's strange to live in a place with ongoing political instability when that place is a place, like London, which is reputed worldwide for its safety and predictability. The importance of word of mouth grows by leaps and bounds as the media struggles along with the police. Watching a given few minutes of the live news updates gives you a palpable sense that the media is confused and vague, stammering, playing videos they found on Twitter or Facebook that are a couple of days old, interviewing a myriad of people, who, with the exception of a few voices, Darcus Howe, Nina Power, and Ken Livingstone among them, condemn the general situation in a vanishingly narrow variety of ways.

Some people are angry and rude during this time, some are far more relaxed than usual. There are all kinds of emotional responses. The overwhelming sensation is one of dislocation, a rumbling tremor or a sociopolitical earthquake, something beneath the surface which is being released. That surface is the image of a society of propriety, a society too proper to suffer from any illegal relocations of private property on a massive scale, what David Cameron famously called a "Big Society," the most civil in the world. What lies beneath is not easy to name, but it has something to do with what has always been the subterranean, occluded engine of capitalism: the ignored, who by virtue of their condition both make possible and mark the impossibility of a society which profits from its capacity to beat them down, to attempt to convince them that their oppression is as natural and as just as the stars in the sky. The commentators have been using the word "monsters" to describe the youths, along with other epithets like "idiots" and "morons" (yet the term "anarchist" seems to be sidelined, seemingly reserved for the student [mostly middle class, mostly white] protestors earlier this year).

Certainly there are condemnable things that have been done by rioters, as in any situation when law is not enforced, such as the deaths in Birmingham and the people who lost their homes, as well as locally-owned business which were raided. But one must also inquire as to the long-term effect of chain stores like Curry's (The UK equivalent of Best Buy), Foot Locker, and Tesco (which owns Fresh & Easy and has a horrific labor relations record) on the poorest neighborhoods, the places where the riots first "kicked off." Poor neighborhoods like Hackney, Tottenham, and Peckham, Livingstone said on BBC, are both the same ones that have suffered the greatest public services cuts as well as the ones which are most occupied by massive, impersonal flourescent chain stores which regularly squash labor rights and pay minimum wage, maintaining high employee turnover as a way to keep afloat. As Dr Sofia Himmelblau wrote just now, "It is no coincidence that the primary target of rioters, despite a media-narrative keen to play up the social impact of these events on small retailers, was large retail warehouse stores that cling parasitically to neighbourhoods at the periphery of inner cities."

In the media, the "critical" attention is focused on a false debate, between condemning and condoning the actions of the youths. My flatmates disagree with me that this debate is false--they tell me that my refusal to engage with it is a kind of indifference or extremism, but I call it a false debate because there is really one side to it. That is to say, not a single public figure has come out in explicit support of the participants in the riots: even Darcus Howe, who was treated like a rioter himself by the BBC presenter because he tried to place it in the context of racial profiling and police brutality, condemned the riots from the beginning. One rapper from Peckham tweeted to his followers on Saturday that they should loot, perhaps sarcastically, and then deleted his twitter account because he was worried that the police, who already try to shut down each of his concerts, would punish him for it. The only public viewpoint lies within the boundaries of unequivocal condemnation, and the monopoly of opinion is such that those who try to explain the riots by placing them in context, just like figures who tried to place the 9/11 attacks in context, are either shouted down or ignored.

A major difference that may be hard to imagine for an American is the racial complexity of the situation. The UK is not segregated in the same way as the United States. While many social spaces are clearly white, there are a considerable number of so-called white people who live in city slums, which is quite different from a city like San Francisco or Oakland. The truth is that these youth are not all black but are to varying degrees responding to the way in which the police department treats both blacks and the poor, with several hundred suicides in their custody in the last decade. I say "blacks and the poor" because in a surreptitious way blackness stands in for poverty in the logics of neoliberalism, in the sense that people like Smiley Culture who were not or were no longer poor were still killed by the police with no government consequences. We cannot say that whites have not suffered from the climate of police terror, but we can safely say that wealthy whites (i.e. those millionaires who populate the cabinet and who run the country) have not found themselves in the conditions of pressure that these youth deal with every day, of which police terror is the most bare and hypocritical but not necessarily the worst. The conditions of pressure which led hordes of people, not merely youth and not merely black, to take what was not legally theirs were many and varied but have to do, broadly, with growing austerity measures designed to line the pockets of people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron and, in a bizarre "libertarian" paternalistic logic, to "motivate" them to be entrepreneurs by denying them any opportunities.

An American friend of mine just told me that her Dad didn't believe there were riots in London. This says quite a bit about the American perception of London but equally it might say something about London itself. On the one hand, why is it that Americans tend to imagine London as the relatively small space north of the Thames and south of Kilburn, west of Hackney, which is the most white and expensive part of the city? On the other hand, how does this completely false perception influence the climate of exasperation which led to the revolts?

Norwegian Terrorist

2011-07-24T07:34:00.001-07:00

- Disguised himself as a policeman to kill 96 people
- Justified it in terms of an anti-immigration Christian white supremacism, which he documented in a 1,500 page manifesto: http://www.scribd.com/doc/60744006/2083-a-European-Declaration-of-Independence
- Up-voted reaction to a top google video about the killings:

"I in no way condone this act, it is the wrong way to do things,these people were innocent, but had warped political views, just as the perp had,however this needs to be awake up call to all the governments around the world that are soft on Muslim immigration, it it you that are guilty of creating this crime,you created this idiot,people are fed up with Muslims moving into and taking over their countries, I fear this is just the beginning, war has started, and it is left wing ideology's fault."

- The "anti-bin Laden" whose views are a mirror image of bin Laden's (except that unlike bin Laden he wanted to carry out the murders himself, by his own hand). Easily fits into Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis as well as the zero-sum game
- Just a month earlier, a news story reported that Norway's sovereign wealth fund, approx. $500 billion, is the second-largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia?)

2011-07-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Musée du Louvre-- centered by I.M. Pei's massive, defiant ornament of skeletal geometry, dropped right in the middle of a classical plaza with statues of French conquerors, instead of gargoyles, staring down at you. Their robes are the baroque conceit of a much older architect, billowing yet contained in the exacting hands of the colonizers. A Mercedes construction vehicle, adorned with industrial hoses, emits a laborious noise under status of Richeliu, Montaigne, Houdon, Duperac. The vehicle appears to be removing sewage from a trap door beneath their feet. Bare-breasted, anonymous female statues are perched two tiers above the Great Men. They look like the statue of liberty model, an African woman, according to Lewis D. Gordon. A drab, once-white Ferris Wheel circulates at the edge of the plaza.

The Louvre leaves no doubt as to the relationship between aesthetic waste and grandeur and political dominion. White Americans despise the French for the simple reason that, even today, the French empire is, in a couple of ways, the most powerful in the world, even as its colonies have been independent for years. With a much more vast and "high" style than the American empire, it fascinates, transfixes, and bewitches the entire world with its opulent ecstasy; its sinister brutality is inseparable from its ability to create a feeling of ambient awe which hegemonizes and fixes the concept of greatness. What are the thoughts of those who are very nearly the only Black people in the Louvre, the Afr0-French who work as security guards, as they stare, week after week, at the marble semblances of the potentate?

Achille Mbembe's Lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Figures and Fictions Conference

2011-07-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

- A critical reassessment of South African photographic culture is long overdue. We must open the discourse on photography to discourses on other art forms. This opening must take into account processes changing the photograph, such as the ethics of mass reproduction.

- It must attend to the paradox that our world is ever more globalized, and, at the same time, ever more Balkanized.

- Not so long ago, people like Simmel read the world as a huge mathematical problem—in terms of calculation, reification, and abstraction. This would have been a world governed by “electronic reason”—the conversion of the human body into data, as with neural imaging and DNA analysis.

- Such conversion changes not only processes of subjectivation, but the meaning of matter and the human.

- One issue in the practice of photography is inquiring as to the criteria which constitute the human. Digital technology accelerates this inquiry.

- Through the 20th century we witnessed the emergence of image capitalism. In image capitalism the image does not simply replace the number but becomes a technical issue in itself. This problem is mentioned in the work of Benjamin, Kracauer, and others.

- The calculative, affective, and the sensorial collapse into the image form.

- A circuit which runs from emotions to passions to convictions is newly reconnected to the image. These are the new pathways of capital itself.

- Images have become a constitutive dimension of the capitalist forces reshaping our affective world. They are, therefore, no longer merely an automatic, replicative reflection of the real world.

- Faith, sincerity, and conviction become increasingly important in image practices.

- Photography is fraught with problems today because of the nature of colonial rule.

- Colonial regimes had to produce a colonial ontology which purported to create unchanging social essences, fixed in time.

- Photography became a crucial dispositif in the production of these rules, in order to convince people that all was in order.

- The production of taxonomies, however, was a very unruly venture. The knowledge upon which they were founded was always uncertain.

- The photographic act and the act of ruling are both based on an epistemic uncertainty.

- Colonial governments sought to provide a cast of people’s intimate emotional ecology.

- Photography was produced as a complement to writings on the colony. Early photographs are a tapestry of forms, an interlocking topography of figures, sounds, and senses.

- These processes coincided with the political and rhetorical separation of South Africa from the rest of the continent, as if the nation were a European nation transplanted to the tip of Africa. The most important fictional aspect was that whites needed not form genuine ties with Africans.

- The early 20th century was a culture of expeditions and adventures of three kinds: military, trade, and missionary.

- Photography was informed by the belief that the “pure races” of Africa were dying. It became absorbed in profile portraiture—the arrangement of forces, the comportment of native bodies, surfaces and cleavages, bodies deprived of any interiority whatsoever, a pure portrayal of abjection.

- Then came the restlessness of travel photography–repetition and compilation function like hunting—to photograph is like throwing a die.

- Much photography theory in the West has been about photography’s troubling psychic presence to the Real—its doubling and anarchic unruliness, its power to excise time—a deep anxiety as to the constitutive elements of the Real. Such an anxiety is not found in Western or Central African anthropologies of the Real. Baudelaire, Barthes and others were preoccupied with the question of stabilizing, restoring, and recentering the Real.

- The photograph, in essence, was a fixed image created by light. The process by which a substance is mediated by light.

- This was the case until digital photography.

- Western theory reads photography as the substitution of a living image by a physical object. This substitution has brought back some old animistic beliefs, setting in motion a dialectics of animism, mechanism, and reproduction.

- The animistic sign of the primitive, then, is summoned in the very act of precise documentation that supposedly inaugurates rationality. The anxiety that the Real will be eaten up by the spectre of the primitive returns in the image.

- Photography keeps the human person in circulation, in a kind of Promethean act. It traces the shadow of the subject by permanently capturing something fleeting. Death alone can no longer remove the human from circulation. The image, not the body, marks duration in the moment of photography. Photography liberates the human from the slavery of the body with its power of luminous ephemerality. The subject now has access to a purely spectral future.

- The commonality of contemporary South African Black photographers is that they aim at retrieving the human from a history of waste. Peter Magubane, Mofokeng, and many others.

- Black photography shares a certain understanding of risk. To photograph meant to take personal risks, to end up in exile...Magubane went to prison many times.

- I don’t want to make it appear that there was a time when photography was powerful, and a time when it was no longer. That is not what I would like to convey.

- However, there was a time when, in photographs, life was not only narrated, but photos were, in and of themselves, events of life. These were powerful images, because in those photographs (Magubane, Mofokeng, etc.), the Real was in search of its concept, and the image provided that concept. This had nothing to do with high theorizing. Such photographs simply became the places for an encounter with the present.

- The question one should ask is therefore whether we can discern similar tensions which mark contemporary South African art and photography. Contemporary South African art seems content to use the techniques of quoting, re-appropriation, and recombination.

- After apartheid, we have not witnessed the explosion of aesthetic boundaries one would expect.

- We have to wonder whether art in general, and photography in particular, has lost its historical power to give form to life, and has, instead, become subservient to repetition.

- This malaise tends from the fact that, as a country, South Africa itself is a museum without walls. A total museum. This museum is installed everywhere and nowhere in particular. It seems unable to create an archive.

- There seems to be no nexus, no grid to locate or organize what has been dispersed and fractured. History has been replaced by an endless procession of bodies, a permanent compiling of weak images and objects devoid of any concept. That’s what I believe.

- This inability to create an archive is probably the most potent dilemma affecting cultural life in South Africa today.

- Because of this inability to create an archive, we no longer know how to distinguish between objects and images. We are unable to give distinct meanings to distinct things. This gives us the overwhelming feeling of a radical fragmentation and dispersion of the Real. Yet there is still life and movement, life that comes and goes with ebbs and flows. But there has been a delay with absorbing the new Real in art, a duplication of delays, including the suspension of the revolution by the settlement called democracy. For the real purpose of democracy is to put off the revolution.

- The main tension within South African culture and society today is the realization that there is something unresolved in the settlement that brought an end to apartheid. There has neither been a big defeat, nor a big victory, so there is a stalemate, including in the field of culture.

- Meanwhile, new inspirations are underway. New inspirations of how people desire things and desire each other produce images of their own creation. This question of self-creation and self-ownership will become the post-apartheid question par excellence.

- New photography depicts subjects who are struggling to construct themselves fully and consciously in terms of desire, fantasy, and memory. It refers to forms of life that are inseparable from new bodily forms, it renders visible new hetero and homoeroticisms.

- It is in search of a way to love after racism has inflicted so much damage to the psyche, and in the midst of so much continuing suffering.

- The photographer is a witness to life, life understood as a regenerative force.

- I would like to end with a reference to Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a Black British artist. I would like to end with his gesture to the mask, in a piece called “Traces of Ecstasy.” I end with his work and thought in order to gesture toward what we may call the masks of the Real and the limits of photography. Kayode did not develop a full-blown theory of the African mask. But he was onto a very significant path when he argued that, in precolonial Africa, the Real always appears under the sign of the mask, or is usually read through the lens of the mask. A mask is both a sign of human presence and of his or her absence. It is made of images suggested by human or animal forms. It is fundamentally an imaginative interpretation of life. Its function is to produce ambiguity so that interpretation becomes possible, because without ambiguity there is no possibility of interpretation. In order to interpret, we need to undermine conventional perceptions by bringing incoherence to the surface of life. Otherwise, the mask is equivocal as the Real itself. Photography excludes as much as it contains. It can only transcribe human experience in terms which preclude the fragmented and ambivalent equivocal nature of life and history as symbolized by the mask. The incoherence of human experience can never be reconstituted within the limits of the photographic frame, so maybe it’s time we stop asking photography to do what it cannot do.

Question and Answer Session:

- I’m not South African, so I feel somewhat irresponsible commenting on it at such length, even though I’ve lived there for several years. Nobody has called me to account for my irresponsibility, which should tell you something about the place. I come from West Africa, and a few things come to me when one thinks of South Africa as an idea, not just as a geographical location. And I think that’s the task of art: to think of a place, a region, as an idea or a concept.

- The end of apartheid is one of the defining events of the 20th century. It is the first time in recent history that a racial state has been dismantled. That has not happened elsewhere. But the event has not happened in the way we’d hoped it would happen. It has happened in a totally different manner, in an unexpected way. So from a cultural point of view, what South Africa is facing is the difficulty of dealing with the unexpected, which takes the form of the unresolved, and the whole new set of dilemmas for which there doesn’t seem to be a name.

Picture c/o https://www.facebook.com/pages/Perpetual-Peace-Project-Film/118403398180353

unsigned hype

2011-06-30T18:52:00.001-07:00

2011-06-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

In 1964, after having been introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in New York, Paul McCartney remembered Brian Epstein standing in front of a mirror, pointing at himself and repeatedly saying "Jew!", and laughing loudly, which McCartney found hilarious and "very liberating".

2011-06-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

"Don't just do something. Sit there!"
- Buddhism

2011-06-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

After a 25-year career on Wall Street and an “enjoyable” transition to publishing novels, Lender said he would encourage other bankers to pursue similar personal activities they enjoy.

“It may take a decade to really make it happen, but they can do it,” he said.

2011-06-19T16:31:00.003-07:00

this is a banner ad. i'm supposed to want to meet these women?

Haley Barbour, current governor of Mississippi

2011-06-16T01:51:00.000-07:00

In December 2010, Barbour was interviewed by The Weekly Standard magazine. Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City during the civil rights era, Barbour told the interviewer regarding growing up there, "I just don't remember it as being that bad."[56] Barbour then credited the White Citizens' Council for keeping the KKK out of Yazoo City and ensuring the peaceful integration of its schools. Barbour dismissed comparisons between the White Citizens' Councils and the KKK, and referred to the Councils as "an organization of town leaders". Barbour continued in his defense of the Councils, saying, "In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City." Barbour's statement did not address the role of the white supremacist group in publicly naming and blacklisting individuals who petitioned for educational integration[57] and how it used political pressure and violence to force African-American residents to move.[58] This led to a considerable outcry in which critics such as Rachel Maddow accused Barbour of whitewashing history.[59] In response to criticism, Barbour issued a statement declaring Citizens' Councils to be "indefensible."[60]
In what some[who?] have speculated was an attempt at damage control just days after the interview, Barbour suspended the prison sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two African American women who received life sentences resulting from a 1993 mugging in which the two women stole $11.

"Web it was we were" - Nathaniel Mackey

2011-06-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

They say art cannot be taught, but technique can be taught, and that is what they teach. So what is art, besides technique? What goes into a drawing besides the mechanics of my pen and the chemistry of the paper and ink, besides the angle and pressure of my hand and the series of strokes?

The reduction of art to technique is like the reduction of education to training, or justice to compensation or revenge. It removes something of admiration, something worth admiring. The technique of the building of a concept.

Or the placement of a ritual, art as a ritual. Reducing art to technique removes the question of the source of the inspiration, or maybe it removes the inspiration itself. What is the difference in inspiration between the first blues musicians and the graduating class at a prestigious music school? One would hope there are some similarities, but one also thinks of Nina Simone, who never forgot that they rejected her from music school because of who she was, or even Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who originally wanted to be an opera singer like Robeson, but ended up having his #1 hit, which he recorded while blacked out drunk, remembered now for its sampling in a Notorious B.I.G. song...

The inspiration of finding oneself in a world that finds your existence to be criminal, that tells you to be otherwise or disappear, and you find you cannot disappear. This is a bridge to the conversation I've had so many times, that always re-presents its truth in my own experiences, of the poor who are generous, the poor whose eyes are full of a kind of vital experiential striving which is either drowned or drowning in the wealthy. Privation and exclusion make it no longer optional to imagine and practice what Nahum Chandler calls "the general possibility of the otherwise."

The otherwise to selfishness, to greed, even to the elevation of greed into a supposedly affirmative principle of life, is no newer than the gospels--in fact, it is this elevation that the teachings of Jesus rail against, and Ayn Rand is only the most recent in a long series of demagogues to try to reverse the ideals of Christian love which, of course, were not invented by Christ and which find an expression in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and any "paganism." And one finds that those who are most marginalized are those in whom the striving for an otherwise is most inherited, for whom the expression of a curve, a swing, the curve which is another name for love, Lucretius' swerve of atoms, finds its deepest source.

Pleonasm Humor

2011-05-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes on Wikipedia when a "citation is needed," it doesn't really matter whether something is true or not...it's great either way.

From the article about pleonasm:

Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved over time; or a precise meaning familiar to specialists, but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "terms and conditions", "each and all" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents. A classic example of such usage was that by the Lord Chancellor at the time (1864), Lord Westbury, in the English case of ex parte Gorely,[1] when he described a phrase in an Act as "redundant and pleonastic". The fact that this phrase in itself was a pleonasm is something which probably had not escaped the learned judge, and could be suspected to be evidence of a particularly Victorian legal sense of humour.[citation needed]

"Black Women Less Attractive." - A Scientist

2011-05-20T05:32:00.000-07:00

This is not a new idea. It's not a news story. It's not notable that a highly-paid scientist at an elite university would use statistics to pretend to prove it, apart from any social or political context.

The author, in true keeping with the thinking of the Bell Curve, finally says that black women are probably less attractive because they naturally have more testosterone than other women.

His job requires, he seems to think, that he leave out any social or political aspects of the aesthetics of race and beauty, that he look at race as a purely scientific phenomenon, even after generation after generation of legal segregation, police and state violence, and social divisions which substitute race for class.

But race is not a scientific category. Or it is scientific to the extent and in the sense that the Eiffel tower is scientific: it's a real construction of human society.

So we have to look at race, particularly the binary imaginary of black and white, as we might look at the Eiffel tower: as an aesthetic monument which was built in a particular political context for certain reasons. Because we don't have black people or white people--we have various shades of brown and beige. And black Americans have far more, genetically, in common with white Americans than with most Africans, which is linked to a history of nonconsent.

Ultimately we can't put this task in the hands of scientists alone, especially not people like this author who seem to want to ignore both politics and aesthetics completely. We should listen to philosophers, artists, and literary critics, not merely because these are three areas where black women are far better represented in numbers than in the so-called "hard sciences," for some answers about the entanglements of race and beauty. Hortense Spillers can redirect us from this madness:

The black body "brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless...it is as if neither time nor history shows movement...I would call it the Great Long National Shame...We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us. ("Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Diacritics, 1987, 68)."

In other words, blackness as a real category, as a reflection of something we see with our own eyes in the world, as with skin color or body language, is so thoroughly interwoven with various metaphors of value (economic value, the value of beauty, moral value, etc.), that we cannot make any useful distinctions between them.

In order to see black women as beautiful, it's not enough to throw around the slogan "Black is beautiful," although this is a nice start. We need to revalue all our values, in politics, science, art and history, as Nietzsche and Achille Mbembe have called for, in order to begin to poke our heads out of the garbage heap of guilty racist eroticism.

The hipoisie: a blase attitude

2011-05-16T19:51:00.001-07:00

Frank Chu, a San Francisco eccentric who is venerated for his dedicated campaign against the 12 Galaxies, quadrogonic hyponetikalism, Clintons and Bushes, Thomas Jeffersons, and any number of other crimes against himself and his character. His worldview is as complex and ornate as the interior of a Gaudi cathedral, and no less dramatic:

Like many bay area residents, he commutes to the city every day by train, arriving at Montgomery Street around 8am and going home on the last train at midnight. He suffers from autism and other psychological disorders--when he was 24 he took a few members of his family hostage, firing a bullet at the police which, luckily for him, missed. He has had a bar named after him, which has since closed.

Like Portland and Brooklyn, the bay area has in the last ten years been hit with an influx of young people, mostly middle-class and "alternative" in style, who might be well described with a term from Kodwo Eshun: the hipoisie, the hip new bourgeoisie, who worship Bob Dylan just as much as Fela Kuti. There's no point in raging against them, since anyone who does so is probably part of them, trying to mark a line in the sand which does not exist (at the same time, the spatial and political effects of gentrification which they leave in their wake are very serious and need to be looked at more closely). But there are some awful qualities:

The worst thing about the hipoisie is its blase cynicism. The definition of the word blase explains it: "uninterested because of frequent exposure or indulgence." This is the attitude of the people who have seen it all, who hide their fascinations under a thick layer of irony. As soon as a band comes out, it's no longer the coolest thing around, as soon as more than a small group of people has heard of them they're not worth talking about anymore. This blase cynicism betrays an enormous fear of the outside, of the world, of people who think and act differently from oneself. This fear is felt to be necessary for a group of white kids who are "slumming," placing themselves on the borders of working or workless class communities in order to prove themselves, to extract some style from a region and a people and turn it into a product.

This hip comedian is "interviewing" Frank Chu, in a style that reminds me of nothing more than Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity: interrupting the interviewee, repeating certain phrases with a sneering tone. He's afraid that if he does a good interview, which requires a real sympathy for one's interviewee, that it might not be funny enough to show to his friends. He wants to put Frank Chu "in his place," by proving him wrong. When he starts calling him a nutcase, Frank Chu makes a really salient point: Bush and Clinton are nutcases too, "crazier than any bacteria or nutcase in Africa." Chu has argued for years that Bush and Clinton are war criminals, and despite the complexity and bizarreness of his other convictions, he might be the only person speaking that kind of truth, on a daily basis, on the streets of San Francisco, especially in this era of ignoring the ongoing wars so as to avoid criticizing Saint Obama.

"On This Earth" by Mahmoud Darwish

2011-05-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread
at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning
of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fears of memories.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the final days of September, a woman
keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in prison, a cloud reflecting a swarm
of creatures, the peoples' applause for those who face death with a smile, a tyrant's fear of songs.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth,
mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name later became
Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

Isaac Cohen - Jtree!

2011-05-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

Dense Bells Forestry

2011-05-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

I Slept in a Field by El Super

The True Prison by Ken Saro-Wiwa

2011-05-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

It is not the leaking roof
Nor the singing mosquitoes
In the damp, wretched cell
It is not the clank of the key
As the warden locks you in
It is not the measly rations
Unfit for beast or man
Nor yet the emptiness of day
Dipping into the blankness of night
It is not
It is not
It is not

It is the lies that have been drummed
Into your ears for a generation
It is the security agent running amok
Executing callous calamitous orders
In exchange for a wretched meal a day
The magistrate writing into her book
A punishment she knows is undeserved
The moral decrepitude
The mental ineptitude
The meat of dictators
Cowardice masking as obedience
Lurking in our denigrated souls
It is fear damping trousers
That we dare not wash
It is this
It is this
It is this
Dear friend, turns our free world
Into a dreary prison

1993

2011-05-10T19:58:00.001-07:00

From Time.com:

another research team that administered questionnaires about emotions four times a day for a week reported that Japanese people feel emotion — any emotion — less often than Americans. And the Japanese respondents tended to rate their emotional events as more neutral than Americans rated theirs.

Maybe the Japanese just get more easily fed up with questionnaires...

Slip N Slide: A short introduction

2011-05-08T00:53:00.000-07:00

Warning: this might offend you. For a couple of reasons. There's some connection between the lyrics, which are brilliant in an amoral way, and the technique of the production, the way the bass is layered with the samples, which is just undeniable. If this were representative of hip hop in general, and if the music were taken just for its lyrics, it would be easy to argue that hip hop has no political meaning whatsoever. But the bass is deep, and Trick Daddy's voice is deep, as deep as Florida is South. His interjections placed over his own verses press down on the entire song...

It all began here, after Trick Daddy caught the attention of the infamous Luke, the man almost solely responsible for those little black and white stickers on CDs. Trick and Trina establish themselves as the king and queen of Miami here, and there's even a hairspray-wearing court jester running around. The production is strengthened by the bouncing echo of Trick's voice (ah-ah!)

I do think in this video Trina became the first woman to name her price on MTV ("twenty G's for the nut, what"...). She is much more believable than Lil' Kim or Nicki Minaj--even if she did get plastic surgery, which is unlikely, her style of presentation is more honest than either of theirs.

Trina - by Warner-Music

A classic pan-Southern collaboration:

Trick Daddy - In Da Wind by freship

With one of the coldest verses since the Geto Boys, Trick Daddy raps "fuck the judge and C.O.'s, fuck the family of the victim, witnesses, snitchin' ass ho's, cuz I'm a thug." Love that shot of the white kid getting pulled away from Trick Daddy by his mom as he waves at his hero. Trick Daddy taunts bougie black folks just as mercilessly: if I'm your worst nightmare, get ready for some sleepless nights, cuz I'm a thug.

He puts words in the mouth of his rival, whose girl he may or may not be interested in: "'Bitch, I been watchin you watchin him/ you must wanna fuck this nigga,'" and adds, "My name alone/ been known to break up happy homes." Rest In Peace Family Values.

TRICK DADDY - I'M A THUG by hushhush112

Probably the best song ever made for and about basketball. Again the vocal echo is used in the intro

Trick Daddy - Take It To Da House by freship

2011-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

The significant overlap between babysitting and standup comedy

2011-05-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine wrote a fascinating blog post about the overlap between computer repair specialists and therapists. More and more, he said, the person who fixes your computer is prepared to, basically, counsel you, because the trauma of losing access to your workstation is increasingly enormous.

I notice a similar kind of occupational drift with regard to standup comedy. Today the way comedians practice their art has everything to do with the way they deal with "hecklers." A drunk man, in 2003, kept yelling "yeee-haw!" from the back of The Fillmore at Dave Chappelle. Eventually Chappelle found a way to incorporate this guy into his act, asking the crowd, "who here likes to give head?" and, after a beat, "thought I was gonna hear you, yee-haw guy." This is the traditional formula: a heckler is hostile and disruptive, the comedian makes fun of him, the crowd returns its focus to the comedian.

But in the two clips above, something different might be going on. There are basically three hecklers in these videos. During Hannibal Burress' set, a man, who's probably tripping on something psychedelic or maybe just a nutcase, is publicly displaying his enthusiastic affection for a woman who seems to enjoy the attention too. During Galifianakis', it's a woman who gets on his stage and starts acting like an oblivious, rambunctious kindergartener. In both cases, the crowd members don't seem to want to attack the comedian directly, but just to get attention themselves, to be performers themselves. They are literally regressing, ignoring the standard procedures of adult events like standup comedy by acting like very young children. Maybe there's something to this idea that the generation of people born in the 80's are now big, adult-sized children, unprepared for life as adults.

White voodoo

2011-05-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Apparently the word 'voodoo' catches the eye of corporate executives looking for marketing research--or whatever it is these seemingly infinite urban 'consultancies' do. There are not one, but two such vague institutions within the city of London who have taken their name from the religion whose roots are in West Africa. They do things like "design, programming, e-commerce, search engine marketing and optimisation, usability, copywriting, fulfilment operations, store management and statistical analysis," as well as "rigorous analysis" and "candid explanation." Those last two quotes were from the trendier, hipper-looking firm, so hip that they don't have a picture of themselves on their website and it looks like it could be a site for an Urban Outfitters. They provide solutions, analysis, new ways of looking at things, and even ways to make a difference. I should be working for them, right?

2011-04-27T15:37:00.001-07:00

APOCALYPSE comes from the Greek apokalyptein, which means the unconcealing, the bringing to light, the revealing. The Western canon, insofar as there ever was such a thing, has believed in the occlusion of the pre-apocalyptic present from itself. In this tightly-guarded monument to paranoia that is European Ideals, the present can only exist insofar as it is not apocalyptic, insofar as it hides its true nature, which is the apex of the highest beauty and the lowest degradation, all at once in the figure of the banal, the heart-disease-ridden bag lady at the bus stop, the shivering heroin addict on the corner, oversexed chattering people, men who love gambling, pub quizzes, immigrants and "natives." The incessant, libidinal invasion of the present by dark spectres, formless forms, by the chromatism of hiding, eruption and fugitivity. The Black death, the hiddenness of truth, the final uncovering of truth in the Holy Revelation and Resurrection. The light is only at the beginning and at the end, in the cratio ex nihilo and the apocalyptic revealing of the bifurcation of being into those who are saved and those who are damned, the civilized and the sinners.

How to think the apocalypse otherwise is our hope and our wager. What could the apocalypse be if not a revealing, or could it be a revealing that reveals what was already there? The collapse of everyday things into other forms, the life that lives on death? The apocalypse which is real for the grass dying outside, for the plants and animals dissembling in our intestines, just as much as for the new lives which emerge to multiply from the fresh corpses. There is no drama here, at least not in the sense of a final Reckoning or Revelation, aside, perhaps, from the plant's understanding that it will be returned to the multiplicity which already traversed it. To feed on sunlight, on the creator which will ultimately destroy our world with its overzealous, exuberant abundance.

The Angry-dad-ification of Marshall Mathers

2011-04-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

Having been twelve and amidst a large cohort of urban white kids, I remember vividly Eminem's dramatic entrance onto the national scene in 1999. For the first time, it seemed, the familial, oedipal, self-harming psychoses of a white youth were placed alongside the gangstafied funk and soul revivals of a black producer-icon, Dr. Dre. It was as if Kurt Cobain had been reborn, in a black neighborhood, with a sense of humor. A perverse kind of musical cotton candy, it became the quintessential youth "headmusic," to borrow Kodwo Eshun's phrase. For the entirety of my 13-year-old life I could remember men in the neighborhood blasting hip hop from huge, lumbering American cars as they passed my house. Eminem seemed to be the first massive rap artist who was immune to this type of broadcasting. Yet every private-school boy, mostly white and asian, had a copy, bootleg or genuine, of the Slim Shady LP and its darker followup, the Marshall Mathers LP.

Hey, kids! Do you like violence?

Eminem's appeal seemed solely male, a sort of musical accompaniment to the first-person-shooter game, each track repeating, in explicit and gory detail, a series of assaults and overdoses (See, for instance, "Brain Damage"). It was their outlandishness, their absurdity, that made them OK to us, and this appetite for the fantastic may have been Eminem's way of refusing the compulsion to prove his "street cred"--the stories, like those of Slick Rick, were often so entertaining that nobody cared to ask if they were true or not. At the same time, though, there were stories about his relationship with Kim that made people hope they weren't true. One of the moments in Eminem that I loved the most was his hook on the track "Role Model":

I came to the club drunk with a fake ID
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I've been with 10 women who got HIV
Now don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I got genital warts and it burns when I pee
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree
You probably wanna grow up to be just like me!!!

His joy at the prospect of his own imaginary castration set him far apart from other hip hop artists, even Dre himself, for whom the mention of one's own penis could only be a metaphoric reference to size and power. Eminem's antics were all in the service of the overarching philosophical journey towards "just not giving a fuck".

I would not, then, have guessed that Eminem's career would proceed the way it has, although, looking back, I really can't imagine how else it could have gone. Nowadays, his tracks are inevitably put together by superstar producers and played almost as a kind of "urban easy listening," that is to say, everywhere that plays hip hop music--malls, convenience stores, salons. His new ("post-addiction-metamorphosis") tracks lack the utter Dionysian destructiveness of his early ones, but are no less angry or violent. Nowadays, he yells like a middle-aged alcoholic, his voice devoid of the mischief and humor of the bleached-blonde days. His tracks have always, since "My Name Is," been mainstream, but now they occupy a different mainstream, one which includes middle-aged people, black people, and women. That's not to say that black people never listened to Eminem at the beginning, but I remember the moment when D12 came out as a turning point, at which a black kid I knew told me he thought the early stuff wasn't very good, but this new stuff was better. At the beginning he really was Elvis to many people, the white guy stealing the art form and making a lot of money off of it. Now he's just another abusive dad, his anger completely uncontroversial, the pitched rage of his voice used to "balance out" the soulful harmonies of the female singer he accompanies. I don't mean to suggest that his anger was more controversial when he directed his vitriol toward Christina Aguilera, Fred Durst, Insane Clown Posse, and Mariah Carey. But in those days it fooled people for whom the entire world consisted of MTV into thinking that he really was rocking the boat. Nowadays he's another jealous, over-the-hill lover, yelling at Rihanna: "I'ma tie you to the bed and set this house on fire!!"

Something Spiritual Stops Terrorism

2011-04-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

2008's Deja Vu, a satisfying romp in the impossible, directed in name by Tony Scott but in reality by Bruckheimer.

It's hard to isolate what it is about the film that makes it pre-recession, but it couldn't have been made after 2008. Not enough cynicism, too much techno-optimism and naive terrorist paranoia. Denzel sends a note back in time to an ATF agent, his former partner, which says, in few words, that there will be a terrorist attack at a particular time and place. The agent rushes, alone, to the location, and is shot dead by the terrorist. In light of the recent scholarship showing that the authorities passed up the opportunity, on a number of occasions, to prevent 9/11, this is a nice, comforting fiction that does not belong. The entire idea that any federal agent is willing to put his/her life on the line for the lives of everyday people is dubious, unfortunately. Since their creation, the various secret polices have not served to protect the people, but to protect the people from being dissuaded from following certain legitimized centers of power, and "neutralizing" others such as Fred Hampton, Patrice Lumumba, and so on.

A more amusing comfort is the creation of an attractive collaboration of races in the execution of cutting-edge scientific projects... when last I checked the faculty at CalTech was about 95% white. Val Kilmer, a Jewish guy (the Hebrew Hammer AKA Adam Goldberg, an actor who, in not changing his Jewish name, and in playing stereotypically Jewish characters, has become a "character actor"), and a Black woman (Erika Alexander, from "Living Single") are the three top time-travel scientists in the world who create a wormhole in spacetime. Denzel is the House M.D. to them, the subject-supposed-to-know, a kind of brash father figure who tells them what they're wrong and cowardly about, and he's always right, because he can see beyond their narrow, bureaucratic perspective.

Jewish guy: It's physically impossible.

Denzel: What if it's more than physics?

Jewish guy: Something spiritual?

Denzel: Yeah. Something spiritual.

Denzel is the Ed Harris character in The Truman Show, in love with his subject, who he monitors without her knowing, on massive projection screens with a team of lackeys administering reality for him on a billion dollars' worth of technical equipment. Yet, unlike Harris' Manichean manipulator, Denzel is squarely on the side of good in his voyeurism, doing it all for the good of humanity and a beautiful woman who stands for the lives of hundreds of innocents.

The most ignorant option for the terrorist antagonist would have also been the easiest: the mindless Arab bomber from The Hurt Locker (thanks to Hisham Awad for pointing this out). But the filmmakers are not that simpleminded--they opt, instead, for the white nationalist patriot, the Timothy McVeigh type, equally-feared, in urban bourgeois circles. Jim Caviezel, best known for his portrayal of Jesus, is a more perverted messenger now, spreading an incoherent message which is unimportant to the plot, having something to do with patriotism. At the end they try to make it into a Se7en moment, with the terrorist confessing his motivations, but it turns out just to be a ploy to stall for time while Paula Patton prepares to crush him between two cars, which she does, sending him flailing, shooting semiautomatic rounds everywhere. Caviezel's character is a cross between McVeigh and the Columbine Shooters, yet the narrative explains as much about them as Hurt Locker does about Islamic terrorists.

But nobody expected it to explain anything. It does mention an interesting idea about folding spacetime in on itself.

2011-04-22T01:02:00.000-07:00

There are some Black people who think that O.J. Simpson is an asshole, like I do. And some Black people wished Black people would stop cheering and that white people would stop weeping and that we would all say, "well, it's not a big deal." But those days right around in there, I really did feel that, perhaps, white people were going to riot.

- Hortense Spillers

2011-04-18T20:24:00.002-07:00

the mainstream coverage of kingsley burrell's death tries to completely rid the event of any emotion. passive voice, technical terminology, short sentences: http://bbc.in/fhBhre . Compare it to this story, which reaches far fewer readers: http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=19274

Troubled Politics: Kanye and Bush

2011-04-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

We all remember Kanye West, wearing a striped T-shirt, staring at the camera with the same look of disbelief as Mike Myers standing next to him, maybe not sure if he actually just said what he just said. Mike Myers wished he could suddenly be back in Canada where things are calmer. We all knew West was right, even those who claimed to disagree with him, feeling sorry for themselves and their guilty consciences.

Out of all the things that happened to him in office, the worst thing, Bush said, the single hardest thing for him to cope with, was Kanye West calling him a racist on television.

The interviewer corrected him: "well, Mr President, he said you didn't care about black people, not that--"

Bush interrupted, "yeah! He called me a racist! I am not a racist and I have never been one..."

The interviewer pushed him: "are you sure that this was even worse than all the lives lost and livelihoods destroyed in Hurricane Katrina...?"

Bush waffled..."of course that affected me deeply..."

So far this is a typical Bush strategy. Act like a deer in the headlights. In the War on Terror, he's Dirty Harry, ready to smoke the enemy out of his cave, but right now, he's a doe in a pasture, good mood crushed by the thought of someone calling him the supposed "worst epithet in a multicultural society"--a racist.

It looked like his feelings might actually have been hurt. His face trembled with the anxiety that came with any of his talking about issues not related to bombing the shit out of Arab countries. He said that he was hurt by West's comment and did not appreciate it one bit. It's not difficult to call his bluff: there were so many other scandals, with stakes so much higher than this minor incident, and Bush was so good at selling a man-of-steel, shoot-first-ask-questions-later image to his white constituents with a careful, thorough pride.

Sincerity aside, Bush supplemented his vulnerable admission with a phrase lifted from Ebonics (via a hard-working PR intern?)--"I'm not a hater though." He didn't seem to be using the phrase right (being a hater usually implies jealousy), but it's the idea that counts: he's extending the olive branch to West, in his very own native tongue, no less! He's a hep cat! Maybe he actually came across this phrase all by himself (his daughter reported that he listens to Lauryn Hill).

So here's where the Twilight Zone begins: Kanye West apologized to Bush. "I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, I didn't have the grounds to call him a racist," he said to Matt Lauer. "But I believe that, in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don't always choose the right words."

West could have chosen a better platform than the middle of the pledge drive, so that he might have been able to elaborate, to point to some tell tale signs. Under Bush, a drastic expansion of the size of the federal government and the national debt through military and incarceration spending, combined with thorough destruction of many social services and other public programs creates a situation where the rate of poverty for black children is actually higher today than it was in 1968, and there are fewer black senators now than there were in the late 1800s. If one were to take social conditions as one's evidence, and not famous names and faces, it would not be difficult to conclude that George Bush doesn't care about black people.

This statement does not mean, Cornel West said, that Bush believes that every black individual is inferior to every white individual, or that he cares any more about poor people of any other color. Bush has no problem accepting that there are exceptional black individuals, because this is America, where anyone can succeed. But this has nothing to do with justice for a people. And all of the non-black, mostly poor folks who were paralyzed in Iraq or lost their homes to shady unregulated mortgage deals were just as short-changed as poor black folks.

What's most thought-provoking about this apology is that it raises the possibility that Kanye West might care a little bit less about black people than he thought he did. Or that he would rather feel safer by retracting a statement that he felt like he couldn't afford to have made. Or, perhaps most likely, that the increasing division between wealthy and poor Americans, the splitting of society under the dogma of finance profiteerism, is wrenching a small elite of blacks from even the symbolic possibility to make political statements, because they feel that too much is at stake. See, for instance, the interesting, but quite unexpected, shouting match between Cornel West and Al Sharpton on MSNBC regarding Obama's political commitments, or lack thereof.

We are going to see more Clarence Thomases, and perhaps more John Browns. The real possibilities lie in setting aside our common cowardice about saying "love" in a political way, saying that we can love one another in a revolutionary sense.

2011-04-10T02:02:00.000-07:00

typical London bathroom

2011-04-07T21:27:00.001-07:00

This is a description of the most wanted man in America, according to the FBI's most wanted list:

"Brown speaks fluent French and has a Masters Degree in International Business. He is an avid golfer, snowboarder, skier, and dirt biker. Brown enjoys being the center of attention and has been known to frequent nightclubs where he enjoys showing off his high-priced vehicles, boats, and other toys. He has been described as possibly having bisexual tendencies."

women's styles and lifestyles

2011-04-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

She's got style. At least, that's how it seemed for the few moments I saw her on the train and afterwards. She wasn't cheerful, per se, and she had that peculiarly British way of turning inward, which can seem like a lack of confidence but is another way of having a British reserve. But when I asked if I could take her picture, she said, "sure," and, for a moment, seemed satisfied. It struck me as very un-American the way she didn't smile when I took her picture. This not-smiling gaze was a kind of style that I noticed the moment I saw her.

One day, when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, I encountered a man on the bus, either the 40, the 40L, the 51, or the 51A, going between Oakland and Berkeley. I'm not even sure if these bus lines exist anymore, but I used to take them regularly. I might have been with friends this time, because when I was with friends on the bus and people said things that were memorable, often homeless or nomadic people, we would repeat these things to each other for the rest of the day.

I don't remember much about the man or what he looked like, but, like many nomadic people, he had a philosophy that he was ready and willing to share with us, a philosophy of women. On the one hand, he was developing it as he went, and on the other hand, he was kind of trying to instruct us, as if he knew that we didn't have much experience with women, as if he knew that he could tell us something about them. He was both developing a philosophy and acutely exasperated with the lack of a certain trait among women. He kept saying to us, "gameless bitches, man! Gameless bitches! Don't mess with them gameless bitches!" He was describing to us how "gameless bitches" are something to be avoided, a kind of horrible affliction. We didn't discuss it much, probably because we were still very unsure what it might mean to have any kind of "game" ourselves, or what having "game" might mean, and for what, but for the rest of the day we repeated it with a kind of intoxicated glee. We couldn't tell if we were ridiculing him or spreading his insight.

It's really astonishing how many times I've returned to that day in my mind, how many times I've found it utterly treacherous to deal with a woman who has no notion that it might be a good thing to have game. This is something that I have to put into writing to get a hearing for it, because people find it so difficult to believe when I say it to them in speech. The computer screen can't disagree with me and tell me I'm full of shit. The truth is that it's not just a woman's looks that matter. Or, when we say a woman is good-looking, we aren't talking, simply, about her physiognomy or her "natural" features. As Oscar Wilde said, acting natural is a difficult act to keep up. The idea that a woman is beautiful simply because she was born that way is, on a certain level, a complex ploy, a conspiracy perpetrated by an alliance of that woman and a community of style. This is how a woman becomes beautiful, by mobilizing a kind of propaganda machine, a subterranean logic of capture and withdrawal, in order to display a kind of game whose rules are both incomplete and full of traps.

Style is inseparable from looks, in the same way that race and gender are inseparable from behavior. It's not possible to silence the hordes of blank starers who never get tired of insisting on the naturalness and biological predeterminedness of separable and isolated race, gender, and culture. But they protest so much because they know, on a liminal, subliminal layer, that there is something about identity which is not at all predetermined or genetically written. Women have known this for far longer than men. There is very little about Humphrey Bogart's physical body, his facial structure, the shape of his torso, that makes him a sex icon to women--it's all about the way he turns words around, the flick of his cigarette, the positioning of his shoulders, the pursing of his lips, the gaze beyond time which he gives when he looks at a woman, as if to say, I could have you but that might be irrelevant, because there's only one way of all flesh. Game is something like this, a social physics of entanglement which is at peace, what Achille Mbembe has called "serenity in the face of tragedy" in his "Variations of the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound."

I don't want to disparage "gameless bitches" as much as the guy on the bus, because I know that so many of them are kind and well-meaning and intelligent people. It's not simple enough to say that it's the woman who believes herself not to be beautiful. Game is not the same thing as beauty, because the concept of beauty is older, and has more to do with the object of desire. Game is something like the object that desires, or the object that breaks out of its objecthood through a deployment of desire.

Increasingly, to be a beautiful woman is to have style which is to have game. One impact of feminism and of changing conditions in gender relations is that women are implicated in strategies previously thought to be the domain of men alone, like having game. Her "natural" capacities, then, the things which she possessed when she emerged from the womb, are backgrounded and couched in a rhetorical assemblage of enunciation which is her "game" and her style. The way she allows her body to inhabit her clothing, the way she styles her hair, her makeup, her technologies of the self.

P.S. the woman with no game watches a LOT of television.

2011-03-31T19:41:00.000-07:00

When Rolling Stone revised its 500 Greatest Songs Ever list, it dropped these ones. There must be some kind of an aesthetic pattern here. Mediocrity widely and readily read as greatness? The whole idea of ranking a set of the 500 greatest songs ever leads to a situation like this. Although I am disappointed that they dropped the Funkadelic song. Once outside a nightclub I saw a red convertible, women sitting on the back seat, blaring Boston's "More than a Feeling," narrowly avoid a fender-bender. The driver was sloshed.

"Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals (#114)
"Lose Yourself by Eminem (#166)
"Sh-Boom by The Chords (#215)
"Band of Gold by Freda Payne (#391)
"Kicks by Paul Revere & the Raiders (#400)
"I Believe I Can Fly by R. Kelly (#406)
"Crossroads by Cream (#409)
"Lola by The Kinks (#422)
"Devil With A Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (#428)
"Keep A-Knockin' by Little Richard (#442)
"By the Time I Get to Phoenix by Glen Campbell (#450)
"Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price (#456)
"One Fine Day by The Chiffons (#460)
"Search and Destroy by The Stooges (#468)
"It's Too Late by Carole King (#469)
"Free Man in Paris by Joni Mitchell (#470)
"On the Road Again by Willie Nelson (#471)
"One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic (#474)
"Graceland by Paul Simon (#485)
"Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac (#488)
"You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Dusty Springfield (#491)
"Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals (#493)
"Desperado by Eagles (#494)
"Rainy Night in Georgia by Brook Benton (#498)
"The Boys Are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy (#499)
"More Than a Feeling by Boston (#500)

20th century men relating to each other

2011-03-23T19:53:00.001-07:00

The Penis Salon

2011-03-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

Men, hilariously, often do not realize that their penis size has importance to a woman only insofar as any other physical characteristic has importance, that a large penis will not make or break one's attractiveness. Women repeat this time and time again, but a man can't sleep without knowing that he is a 'big man,' that he is himself big, that he is bigger and more capable of damage than the others. Penis enlargement, like so many other monuments of dysfunction and shame, is a growing industry, analogous in kind to female beauty products: a technique of the self, of self-stylization predicated on the excuse of a social exterior that actually cares. Maybe one day soon there will be penis enlargement parlors, or webcommunities about penis size will become vastly more common, as the straight man's obsession with his own body grows to mirror his female counterpart's.

2011-03-07T15:15:00.001-08:00

Respiration

2011-02-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

What's the aesthetic consequence of iPhone culture? A culture of text messages, tweets, one night stands, one year marriages, CEO turnovers, volatile stocks... You might want to say these phenomena lead necessarily to anarchy, total disorder, total breakdown. And speed does kill. But there are, also, ways of adapting to brevity. The culture of the mixtape, of rapping over someone else's beat, often leads to songs which are unusually short, and we will begin to see an increase of songs produced to be the same length, which somehow fit within a smaller frame.

If the hip hop song can support itself without needing a hook, the dance performance can shorten itself as well. From London one might think that things in the arts are better in the states, considering the enormous government cuts and the privileging of 'hard' (erect?) subjects like engineering. But non-Americans may not realize that the American arts have never, really, had the public-funding advantage that they've had in Europe for several decades. There are very, very few public grants available, so artists like the Turf Feinz are compelled to shorten their performances and distribute them over a broader cultural terrain.

The brevity of "Respiration" may have to do with the shooting location. The atmosphere, the car lights and the metal bars, the street lights and the dilapidated buildings add a sense of heaviness. It is moving you toward the pressure of East Oakland, an area which, although it is right next to the bay, feels landlocked, because it has been so reduced by economic drought. Driving or taking the bus through it, one realizes how enormously sprawling it is, how it was designed as a place of retreat for white families, a suburb. Now it has entered the suburban winter, the white people have fled decades ago, to suburbs further removed, and then, recently, returned, to other neighborhoods.

"Respiration" stresses that even in less than two minutes, a meditative moment is not only possible but crucial. To breathe again, to prevent an asthma attack, you need to take a minute or two, and even that small increment is enough to release some of the pressure. After a puff of smoke, Dreal touches his heart. At 22 seconds, the production itself breathes as he drags his foot forward after a backflip. This foot drag is synchronized exactly with a syncope in the song, to borrow a phrase from Catherine Clement: the music itself is cut, its consciousness goes under, its heart stops, and in the background you hear the faintest synth whose ominous minor key evokes Mel-Man's production on The Chronic 2001. Dreal displays the incredible ability of the human body to engage with technology, to deliver itself into a machinic operation. At 40 seconds, the film looks modified: he has appropriated a filmic device. His feet levitate as he shifts weight from one to the other.

Sublime Africanism

2011-02-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

I went to a very small, very white, very alternative private high school. At the beginning of each year we would go on a camping trip, with the entire school. It was a great tradition, and unbelievably rare and expensive, but the hippies in charge insisted on it.

Although students would play lots of different artists from their stereos and Discmans (which were still, in those days, standard), there was one place of overlap. Everybody listened to the band Sublime. There was no argument there. And to this day I credit my friend Danny for getting me to listen to something other than Sublime.

I wouldn't dispute, today, that they were brilliant musicians. Yet it always seemed to me that there was a little too much hero-worship of the lead singer, Brad Nowell, who had died of a heroin overdose in 1996. Some of us had older siblings who had seen a Sublime show, who could pass on the stories of their greatness. He was a martyr, but in a strange way he seemed to be a martyr even before death, as though he died as a result of his fame. You can see this phenomenon really clearly by watching the last video taken of G.G. Allin, the notorious punk icon:
The person who uploaded it describes it this way: "Allin and his band wandering the streets of New York, being followed by a small, but vocal groups of fans. Allin's constant demands to "get high" turn this into the video equivalent of a traffic accident, and it is hard to stop watching, especially knowing Allin is shown on his way to the drug overdose that would kill him."

It is a grotesquely gripping video, and it's actually sad to see how dismayed Allin is by the way his fans act toward him. He's spent all of his time and effort over the last several years trying to convince the world that he's the messiah, and now that he's succeeded, it's getting in his way. His fans won't leave him alone: they follow him all over the place taking pictures, yelling things, stopping traffic. You can't resist the idea that this experience may have led to his overdose that night.

In a much less public fashion, we might also wonder if something similar happened to Bradley Nowell. But the fanatical devotion of his fans, I'd argue, comes from the character of his music. There was a certain sensibility in his songs which compelled legions of white youth to feel eternally grateful to him. They felt, and still feel, as if he had given them an enormous aesthetic gift. I am going to call this the "Africanism" of his music: a series of "repeated rhetorical moves," to quote Christopher L. Miller, instantiated musically.

To speak of Nowell's Africanism is not simply to say that his music has African influences, because this could be said of any music made in the U.S. Africanism, rather, could be compared to Edward Said's famous Orientalism. Miller makes this connection in his seminal book Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. He rejects the idea that Africanism is nothing more than a retention of African "speech patterns, style, or performance." Africanism emerges, in fact, in a "certain disharmony" with its more famous sibling, Orientalism.

Like Said, Miller selects certain exemplary historical figures, people who were once taken seriously and are now forgotten in the academy, because the things they said were so blatantly racist by today's standards. One such figure is a Frenchman named Gobineau, who wrote an essay called The Inequality of the Human Races. What distinguishes Gobineau's theory of the African from his theory of the Asian is that the African stands for a nullity, an empty set. Like Hegel and Kant, Gobineau argued that while the Asian may be cruel, mysterious, and despotic, the African is simply without cognition. "Gobineau and other writers seek to depict [the black African] as a 'pure human machine,' stripped of reasoning faculties and moved only by a blind sensorial desire." This phrase makes me think of Werner Herzog's brilliantly stupid description of the ontology of the grizzly bear: simply a half-bored interest in food and an endless capability for violence.

Gobineau developed his theory to argue that any notion of Black African civilization is "a contradiction in terms; any accomplishment...is directly attributable to white blood in the veins of the population...Black Africa, like the moon, exists for Gobineau only insofar as it reflects something white."

Let me go back to Sublime. For many white youth, Sublime existed as reggae and ska, as the Afro-Caribbean musical and political sensibility. That it to say that it stood in for all reggae and ska artists, with the occasional exceptions of Bob Marley and white ska bands, in the musical repertoires. Like Elvis, they channeled a sensibility and made it extraordinarily marketable. But, in a less hopeful way, they acted as a conduit for the demand for Rastafarian or Caribbean musical tropes in white youth: in other words, listening to their music could foreclose the interests of white youth in reggae and ska. In a sense, a teenager could become less likely to listen to Yellowman or Linton Kwesi Johnson because he had already heard Sublime. In this sense, Miller's formulation ought to be repeated, or rephrased: reggae and ska existed only insofar as they were reflected by a white, martyred hero.

In "Waiting for My Ruca," Nowell taught millions of white youth how to say "buh, buh!" and to mean it.

And see the legions of fans worship him shortly before his overdose:

For more examples, check out this article.

Thanatographies: Dancing from a Space of Death

2011-02-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

Turf Feinz: 'R.I.P June'

2011-02-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

James Baldwin wrote that the idea of happiness, in the American experience, is a post-war, tragic illusion. The pursuit of happiness, a small phrase which has been turned into a hegemonic ideal, is, for him, the pursuit of a life without pain, without discord, distinguished only by the steady accumulation of wealth.

Joy, however, is a very real thing, an effervescent eruption that can occur in the most apocalyptic of circumstances. The young men in the video come from one of the most violent parts of the United States. Dancing on the corner where their friend was shot to death, one is wearing the suit he wore to the funeral. They've just witnessed, once more, one of the most glaring contradictions of the American dream, one of the greatest failures of capitalism. But the most sinister question on their minds, the question which they try to ignore, is does capitalism rely, for its smooth operation, on the murder of their friends?

Privatization, globalization, neoliberalism, late capitalism: all of these processes operate by means of what Bataille called the restricted economy. The restricted economy restricts flows of capital even as it persistently expands flows of people and resources. It agglomerates by mobilizing mechanisms of deprivation: there is no privation without deprivation. These images were taken in one of the most deprived places in the First World, because East Oakland has suffered not only from a paranoid white flight but also from a recent black flight, so that those left behind are only those who are forced to stay.

There is no happiness in East Oakland. It would be stupid to call its inhabits 'happy,' on the whole. But there is a joy which bubbles and boils over in moments of art such as these and in its vibrant musical sensibility.

Judith Butler - London, Feb 3, 2011

2011-02-04T14:22:00.000-08:00

The event was jointly hosted by Iniva, a government-funded arts organization, and Amnesty International. The talk was on the theme of paternalism, and it was structured as a dialogue with Sundeep Dasgupta.

Dasgupta began by asking, how might cultural institutions avoid the trap of paternalism? Are there forms of power which accrue to the person being paternalized?

What is the who and the what of cultural difference? What does it mean to end a discourse by making the claim that identity is simply fluid, hybrid, or fragmented? What are the problems with making such a conclusion? Dasgupta implied that this kind of conclusion may lead to a notion of universal transferability and a loss of specificity with regard to cultural difference.

In my opinion, these questions were a bit too tentative. People had come to hear Butler, and she turned these questions into something much more complex:

First we must inquire as to basic questions of address--what is the nature of power in a speech situation?
Our operative presumptions in speech situations involve perceived cultural difference.
Terms employed in policy discourses are those already used in scenes of interlocution.
Butler encouraged people to interrupt her: Bertolt Brecht said that 'interruption is everything.'
How is a subject produced through a speech act?
If I extend recognition or allocate funds to a culturally different group, I am establishing a paternalistic relationship of benevolence.
If this Other accepts my allocation they are accepting, potentially enhancing, and augmenting my power to paternalize.
This paternalistic 'I' differentiates him/herself from the recipients of the benefits (the paternalized).
Sometimes, tragically, the more I give, the greater the gulf becomes between myself and the recipient.

States offering recognition to new immigrants is an instance of such paternalism, as is the allocation of human rights benefits based on recognition of the humanness of a subject.
Especially in the U.S., health benefits are distributed paternalistically.
The paternalistic relation is about the distribution of benefits. Some ask, is redistribution taking place equitably?
However, if we think only in terms of redistributive equality we fail to question the presumptive paternalistic sovereignty because we credit the sovereign for equal redistribution.
Butler says this against Nancy Fraser, who fails to focus on the fact that the allocator becomes culturally articulated.
Democracy entails modes of self-governance and self-allocation: the people, not the sovereign.
It requires means of distribution which would not solidify the power of the sovereign and its cultural neutrality.
The power of the paternalized depends on whether or not to ratify the sovereign authority and cultural difference by accepting the allocated good.
Butler is arguing for the dispersion of sovereignty through the rethinking of the culture of benificence and dependency (especially in terms of internal others in a state, i.e. welfare recipients).
Europe is already its others.

Q&A: Mubarak said on television that he will protect Egypt [from itself] against radical democracy. Paternalism is here preventing a democratic outcome.
The question of protection: paternalistic protection vs. necessary/democratic. Under what conditions could protection be non-paternalistic?
It is not enough to say that identity is hybrid. One could be a non-essentialist and be very stuck.
There is a problem of borders which limit and force mobility. Mobility is not necessarily either liberating or bad.
We must look to see how difference is produced and reified.
If one receives the entitlement of the benefit and visibility without changing the paternalistic mechanism of power one gets a split between the institution and the 'multicultural group.'
The act has to unexpectedly call into question the structure of power and democratize the means by which goods are distributed.
The lack of such questioning is what allows works by artists of color to be exhibited in expensive galleries in New York City while public art institutions are failing.
Butler is not saying that the state is bad: there are many different types of state formation. We could think about more radically democratic state formations which inaugurate modes of self-governance which are less paternalistic and undermine paternalism.
Part of this has to do with the 'NGO-ization of social movements.'
Equal distribution is not the same as the problem of justice. A benevolent paternalistic authority can take away what it gives. Against Schmitt, this may not be inevitable.
Those Westerners who say we should have intervened in Uganda to save the life of gay activist David Kato are making a paternalistic gesture.
The apparent self-deconstruction of the paternalistic sovereign can become a moment of the addition to the power of the sovereign.

2011-01-26T21:21:00.001-08:00

Writing is the opposite of working. Georges Bataille has given us this formulation. He says it with a casual seriousness, as if it was evident. The things that are evident for him make him an alien, in a way, utterly bizarre given our culture, awash in post-Reagan, post-Clinton productivity triumphalism, self-satisfied egotism, corporate narcissism, ignored guilty secrets.

Bataille is on the fringe of French thought, the one who is too strange for the surrealists, too surreal for them. For him the guilty secret is to be opened up and pushed forward into the open that is literature, but literature itself is a guilty secret, is built upon a mountain of secrets and culpability, all having to do with the escape from work to fabulate, to effervesce. Exuberance is beauty, and exuberance is waste.

But why is writing the opposite of working? I love writing, and I love it so much that I have found a way to make it utterly un-workable, to spread it out over many internet message boards and blog posts and emails and hidden word documents which nobody may ever see, including myself. Writing pushes open an abandon that has no interest in work, although work may take it up. You can make a work out of writing, but writing itself is not work and can't be. This is why finding a job is so difficult for me, overcoming this 'crisis of confidence' which may instead be a crisis in the real world, in the political economy, such that people are so terrified of the future that they close off jobs that were left for people who were less interested in making money.

Jewish guilt? Bataille wasn't a Jew, but he understood guilt better than most Jews. Hitler said that guilt was a Jewish invention. This shows that Hitler was afraid of his own guilt, unable to admit that he felt guilty for the crimes of society. His suicidal drive comes directly from this, from the same place as the drive that made Cho Seung-Hui and the Columbine shooters act in the ways that they did.

Jews feel too much guilt--this is the problem. The guilt is what keeps them--us--trapped in a prison of productivity, of the bottom line. Even as communists they become trapped in this prison. The prison has to do with being obsessed with a final point, an overall message, something non-banal, a higher function, something rational, civilized, ignorant of eroticism and timely.

Jewish guilt is what led the Jews into whiteness. Jews felt more guilty than ever after the Shoah, because they had survived, because they had not been the ones with the skin and bones, looking desolately at the camera, dying of diarrhea and being stacked in piles like firewood. Returned to the earth with large machinery like soil being tilled. Because of this spectacle of pity, the remaining Jews, some of them at least, the ones who held some degree of political and cultural power, began to feel that their burden was equivalent to the white man's. They could now take that great plunge, that noble leap, and enlist themselves into the infantry of superiority which governs wall street which governs the continents.

A boy is enamored with computers. There is something about the computers which fascinates him, a sense of profound innovation, a sense of democratic possibility: new forums, new modes of engagement, new discoveries. He takes refuge in front of his computer as he had taken refuge in video games from early childhood: they do not judge you when you look at them, their rules are more stable than social rules, they titillate you only according to your own strict guidelines, they are not concerned with what you are wearing or how you speak, only with your writing, which does not have to be writing like in a book or on the news but lives in small, short bursts, peppered with acronyms and obscenities. He submits quotes that he copied and pasted from instant messaging chats with his best friend, late at night, between games of first person shooters and real time strategy games. He submits quotes to a website which logs funny quotes, moments of the technological mundane which unite geeks across the world, people like him who feel alienated by much of the world but not by technology, and not by each other's virtual representations of themselves. One of his quotes appears on the top 10 of the website, having been rated highly by the other users. It exists in enormous contradistinction to his actual life, which is very comfortable, supported by an unfailingly supportive family with a healthy income and a nice house in a safe neighborhood. In the quote his friend cites a survey that showed that people are more likely to be healthy when they spend time with friends. The boy responds, "not if they're sharing needles."

It's unclear where this joke came from; maybe he saw it on TV, maybe he had wondered, one day, what it would be like to be a heroin user, even though he had neither used heroin nor any other drug, and would not until he was 17 years old. He would not go on a date until the age of 18, persuaded and teased by his friends until he gave in. He prefers his own worlds which he creates to these outside distractions. "His soul squints," wrote Nietzsche, "he loves back doors, hideouts, and secret paths. They are his balm, his serenity."

I knew this boy when I was younger. I used him, or he used me, or both. At this point in our lives I know that we both have serious problems with each other, almost like a sibling rivalry, like twins separated and placed with different parents who ended up growing up together. We are born on the same day, grew up in the same kind of family, went to the same schools. We shared some interests. His obsessions became obsessions for me, as well. In elementary school I wanted to know about video games and television like he did: I was convinced that my lack of exposure to them were responsible for my social alienation. I wanted to be just like him, and as far as I could tell, he didn't know that I existed. This was a moment in which the erotic and the childish were one and the same: I pursued him just like I would pursue a woman today, and this is probably why we weren't friends. I learned about his interests and tried to ingratiate myself to him. For years I let him know, subtly and directly, that I thought he was cool and I wanted to be popular like he was. People genuinely liked him: he was the kid who never got in trouble with the teachers like I did, never cried like I did, never hit the other kids like I did. Unlike me, he'd had no serious traumas as a child, he brought things to school in his lunchbox that other kids wanted. His lunchbox contained, basically, schoolyard capital: fruit roll-ups and lunchables, while mine, ironically less cheaply made, were too wholesome and healthy to command any interest on the bartering market. Throughout his childhood, as far as I remember, he had one haircut and about three shirts, with stripes on them. His haircut was reminiscent of an early-90's child star, with straight brown waves, parted in the middle, framing his forehead like curtains. My haircuts were ever-changing. My hair would not part like his did--it wasn't straight enough.

It wasn't until high school that we became friends, and I use this term because we began to see each other outside of school. Still, however, there was a constant sense that he was less friendly to me than I was to him. But it's possible that he had the same impression toward me: my political views, my anger, my relatively reckless interest in things like women and drugs (which was, in fact, quite tame compared to most American teenagers) bothered him. I began to participate in his concealed worlds of strategy games and first person shooters, of LAN parties and chat rooms and the very beginnings of internet memes (before Youtube, we spent hours on sites that agglomerated videos of the profane and the bizarre). I wanted into these worlds because they seemed to accept me, and he wanted into my world because he knew it would be necessary to learn about the outside world. Women, more than anything, represented this world, because they were entirely absent from the secret masturbatory internet communities in which he lived (there was a longstanding joke, continued on more vicious contemporary sites like encyclopedia dramatica, that There Are No Women on the Internet).

There were also no black people on the internet, it seemed, except in videos which portrayed them as buffoons. To say there were no black people or Latinos or anyone besides Jews and white people and Asians means that they did not get to control the content on the internet or participate in the conversations. And if they did they had better hide it.

I constantly wanted to discuss things outside of the internet, the ways that the internet connected to the real world. He was more interested in going deeper into the interstices of his obsessions. For example, he was at the very top of the worldwide rankings for Warcraft III players, which was the crowning achievement of thousands of hours of practice. I logged hundreds, but not nearly as many as him, which is why I never ranked at all. He got to this high level by developing, perhaps in conversation with other players, the most efficient means possible of winning each game. Instead of clicking on a unit, he would set the unit to a hotkey; instead of clicking on a building to build a unit, he would press a hotkey which represented the building. He was a master of the secret, unplanned ways of exploiting the game, like rushing the enemy's base with just a hero and making it impossible for the enemy to build units. I watched him at the height of his game, and it was like watching a savant, like the autistic man who can draw an entire cityscape from memory. His fingers flashed across the keyboard and he won the game in about five minutes.

I stopped wondering why he was like this. It was probably at this point that I stopped trying to reach him. He was in my history classes, where we studied Marxism and Black Power in great depth, and he got better grades than I did. He understood how to ace the essay tests, how to say exactly the right terms in the questions on Lenin or James Baldwin.

These ideas challenged, upset, and remade me. Almost every day I think about capitalism and racism, homophobia and heteronormativity, colonialism and genocide: to me they are what part of what is most real about life, and part of what is most overlooked. I've often wished I felt otherwise, especially when my friendship began to unravel with this boy. I wanted to genuinely not care about politics like he did, and still be able to ace these tests. I thought that maybe I would do better on them if I didn't care as much, although I did pretty well on them.

My friend said that Marx and Angela Davis were more or less irrelevant now; these were bygone struggles from bygone times, what we should really do is play this new video game or maybe go to the all-night burger place. I couldn't, try as I might, prove to him that our history lessons mattered, because he hadn't grown up the way I did. It's like trying to describe a sunset to a blind person--that's how I began to feel. Feminism, black power, worker's rights--all of these things were irrelevant to him, and our mutual friends seemed to vacillate between his position and mine. He wasn't exactly fun to be around, because he was a recluse, but he could be fun when he decided to be social.

There was a time when I pestered him about girls all the time, sometimes over his shoulder while he played warcraft or talked to his friends on their webcams. He was curious, and he had seen a man's share of porn, but at 18 years old he was still, more or less, prepubescent. I had only lost my virginity a couple of years earlier, in a terrible drunken episode, and I had lied and pretended I wasn't a virgin before that, figuring I'd fake it till I made it. But I finally had something that he didn't, because he knew that he couldn't go too much longer as a virgin.

The only advice I could give him was that he didn't need any advice--just go out there and be social. It didn't work. He might have a couple of drinks with his friends, but he wouldn't talk to girls. He chose the most desired small cute blonde girl to have a crush on, tried to ask her on a date at a dance, and was so bashful about it that the date never happened. He would get visibly hurt when we brought it up.

He had told me that his friend--a chubby, equally nerdy guy, but with a redeemingly spontaneous, fun streak--was dating a girl that was "actually pretty cute, not bad looking." He showed me a picture of her on his cell phone. Ever a step behind, my cell phone had no camera. I couldn't really see what she looked like from the blurry photo, but I could see that she was small and Asian, enough for your average middle class white guy.

About six months later I was friends with her. I had decided, for a change of scenery maybe, and out of a profound curiosity, to become friends with her and her friends at an elite prep school in the hills. My school was a prep school, and it could have been called elite, but it was also for "problem kids," or really intelligent kids who got beat up at public school. In sum, the kids at my school were not very cool: they were quirky, they wore weird hats and a lot of them were punks and neo-hippies and smelled bad. Our school itself smelled bad: it was upstairs from a soup kitchen and crawling with homeless people. The cute Asian girl's school, on the other hand, was perched atop East Oakland like a castle, constantly being remodeled. They had given me the pass when my mom applied for me to go there after elementary school--I'm sure it didn't help that my social skills were well below par.

But the elite school kids liked me. I was always the new guy, the guy who had tried drugs, who was not a virgin, who didn't have a car, who never had a nuclear family, and so on. I represented the rest of the world to them as I had to my Warcraft-playing friend. I dated the cutest, blondest, most innocent one. My acquaintance with them was intense and changed everyone. They relied on me because I was not from their world, and I relied on them because they represented success, or that success which is increasingly allied with money, the success of the O.C. Not coincidentally, they were religiously devoted to the O.C., and they would get together to watch every episode. I remember a particularly piglike, red-faced slimy boy whose real name will probably be Googleable very soon who used to host the O.C. parties. Even when I was dating the cutest, blondest attendant of these parties, I was not really invited. One time I did set foot in his mansion overlooking the city to play pool in his game room. I remember that the outside of his house was all glass and mirrors, and even the deck in front of his front door was made of glass. A huge chandelier hung in the foyer. The house was so fragile...is this why I wasn't invited?

The O.C. is brilliant because it addresses the real world while avoiding it entirely. It starts with a real contrast, and a very stark one: the difference between the gritty lifestyle of Ryan, the poor white Brando or Dean-esque teenager, and the opulent lifestyle of the Jewish Malibu lawyer's family which adopts him. Already, however, in choosing a blonde white actor with a model's appearance, the producers have begun to manipulate their audience, to reassure them that this soap opera will not be dealing with the real world. Sure, there will be deaths and drugs and scandals, but all of them will occur within a pristine aura of opulence and lavish beauty, vistas and high fashion. Nowadays it might be a reality show and hold the same audience.

I was not Ryan, but maybe I did want to be seen as Ryan at times. He was "from the wrong side of the tracks with a heart of gold." He got to sleep with the most beautiful of all the rich girls, because when she asked him who he was, when they first met, he said "anyone you want me to be."

This was an angle that my warcraft-playing friend could never use, having never been on the wrong side of the tracks past dusk. To be fair, I hadn't either, but to him my apartment was on the wrong side of the tracks. To me, the tracks were further west or south, toward the burned-out shells of black working-class neighborhoods which looked for all the world like they had been bombed.

The only advice I could give him was: stop turning it down. Girls are attracted to you, because they're just as horny as you are. Just don't do anything too weird, and don't be too nice or too shy. He wouldn't dance with girls at dances. He'd barely go to dances.

Anyway, you can see where this is going. The Asian girl decided she wanted him. I convinced her via the internet that if she went to his house and seduced him he wouldn't turn her down. I wasn't entirely sure about that. But it worked. That's how I remember the story, at least.

At this moment he began to move out into the world, officially speaking. He became a man, and so on. He became an upstanding citizen. He was seen places. His girlfriend absorbed an enormous amount of his energy and social life. They stayed together in college, her on the east coast and him at my school in california, talking on webcams.

By this time he was studying economics. I was studying Marxism, or, I guess, post-Marxism, something even more unmarketable than Marxism. Building on Marx with Bataille, Foucault, trying to balance that "high theory" with something more grounded, theories of imperialism and race, gender, and class. This was a lot of work. I joined a new department which was designed to study critical race theory, psychoanalysis, marxism, queer theory... He was doing research projects in economics. We quickly began unable to talk to each other about our projects in any depth, because we were more or less unfamiliar with each other's specialized vocabularies. Or we each believed ourselves to be already familiar with what the other was doing, and each time we heard each other talk about his interests, we knew that our paths had diverged. To me, everything he was doing was a New Economy corporatism: what are the incentives which motivate people to make certain choices? To me this was one of the more inane questions, not because it didn't matter but because there were thousands of people who took home nice paychecks and supported mistresses with claims to answer this question. I realized eventually that this question came out of Public Relations, which was founded by the nephew of Freud, someone who I had studied with some interest, but to me this was a waste of Freud, wasting him on something useful. If learning or study or discussion was to mean anything to me it had to be shot through with the kind of evil that belongs to Georges Bataille's literature, the evil that kept Kafka writing, the evil that makes hip hop a public act, the most public of all music in the 90's. We were not learning about Bataille and Foucault and even James Baldwin and Oku Onuora in order to get jobs. For my friend it was as though his passion and his desire to make money had fused, and had fused long ago, before high school.

Time and again he espoused his theory to me, which belonged to Adam Smith and to Milton Friedman before him, that the best and most ethical thing to do is to pursue one's own rational economic self-interest. The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand called it. Isn't that great news? This is when, I guess, I found it difficult not to hate him again. I said, it's only because we studied the Torah together that I love this guy, out of a kind of communal, cultural love, and that love doesn't allow me to see him as my enemy. But, as with the state of Israel, in a way he was beginning to express the exact things against which I wanted to dedicate my time and effort--my life. I wanted to plot to sabotage this self-satisfied ideology. I wanted to commit intellectual mutiny against it, because I knew that it was the structure within which I had to live. I knew that he was right, in the sense that the colonizer was right to call the native a savage: it became right in saying it while holding power. This doesn't mean that it was the only truth, or the one which mattered most. In one way or another, yes, I do need to pursue my self-interest, but only as and through the interests of others.

This is the childishness and the evil of literature. The pursuit of the opposite of work, which is sharing or parcelling-out, giving oneself away and sharing one's body through a labor of love, exactly like Jesus. This point has been made by Altizer and many others, but when you really reflect on it, there is an evil to Jesus that has been almost completely annihilated by our culture which is obsessed with the mirages of happiness and "prosperity." True love, in capitalism, is the utmost evil, because it requires conviction and the breakdown of work for the good of everyday people. And this is what had dried up in my friend.

Or maybe it hasn't dried up, and this is what sustains him and keeps him alive, keeps him on this side of suicide. He has love, but he can no longer show me love, because he doesn't trust me, and never really has. The problem was that he didn't trust me, especially with information about him. He told me a thousand times that I was a gossip, that I needed to learn not to gossip. So the writing of these words is the betrayal, not only of work, but of him, that has forever colored our relationship.

"who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...shadows."

A medicated generation

2011-01-15T17:30:00.000-08:00

Can you (begin to) explain these statistics?

2011-01-06T08:07:00.001-08:00

Many ignored causes...

Oakland, CA: population 399,000
London, England: population 7.5 million

In 2009, London had 15 murders.
Oakland had more than 100 (the SF Chronicle website on the topic is no longer updated...)

Xei the Ghost & Supa Ape

2010-12-26T04:01:00.001-08:00

micro hip hop

Simon Reynolds: War in the Jungle

2010-11-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

The following excerpts are taken from Simon Reynolds' article which is reprinted in The Popular Music Studies Reader. They are an inspiration for my paper, "Despotism and Music."

The year of jungle's mainstream breakthrough in Britain and critical recognition in America, 1995 saw jungle torn every which way in a conflict between two rival models of blackness: elegant urbanity (the opulence and finesse of fusion/garage/jazz-funk/quiet storm) and ruffneck tribalism (the raw, percussive minimalism of dub/ragga/hip-hop/electro). Lurking beneath this smooth/ruff dialectic was a covert class struggle: upwardly mobile gentrification versus ghettocentricity, crossover versus undergroundism.

...Techstep is a sadomasochistic sound. Edrush declared bluntly, 'I want to hurt people with my beats,' and one No U Turn release had the phrase 'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds,' and 'easing the pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound could not have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs such as Bukem and Fabio, with its soothing synth washes and sax loops alarmingly reminiscent of Kenny G.

While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their 'musicality,' the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing 'antimusicality.' Incorporating atonal, unpitched timbres, nonmusical sounds, and horror movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' in electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance of proper songs, and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.

...Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and perverse jouissance in tech-step stem from? Nico described the music-making process-- all-night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smoking weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts,' the kind of skunkanoia without which he could not achieve the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horror-core rap, techstep seemed based on the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment, which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for this kind of music?

If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its 'love, peace, and unity' running counter to Thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Since 1993 and hard-core's slide into the twilight zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales of muggings outside clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hard-core scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere was not moody, it was 'serious.'

In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an ideology of realness that paralleled the worldview of American hard-core rap. In hiphop, 'real' has a double meaning. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late-capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by police. Hence, tracks such as T. Power's 'Police State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera', lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centers now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the death of the social; it means corporations that respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by downsizing.

Gangsta hardstep shares Wu-Tang Clan's neomedieval vision of late capitalism, as influenced by martial arts and Mafia movies whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood honor. Techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator, et al. which contain a subliminally anticapitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence, No U Turn tracks such as 'The Droid' and 'Replicants' and Adam F's 'Metropolis.' 'Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing...to get into the future' goes the sample in Trace/Nico's 'Amtrak.' Given the scary millenial soundscape techstep paints, why the hurry to get there? The answer: in the new Dark Age, it is the 'dark' that will come into their own. 'Darkness' is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where it gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator, not prey.

What you affiliate yourself to with techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U Turn captures this sense that there's no turning back. The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance does not necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself that it expresses itself as, say, the anticorporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militias or as a sort of hyperindividualistic survivalism.

Grada Kilomba - Oct 2010

2010-11-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

- Racism as a procedure of amputation which is included in the 'infernal circle' of otherness
- No agreement is possible within reason - racism requires dealing with forms of unreason
- In Lisbon, Kilomba's street was renamed, by locals, the 'street of the monkeys.' This reveals the fantasy that the Afro-Portuguese were not only not Portuguese, but not human
- There is a wish to be invisible to avoid being hounded in a racist context - racism becomes an obsession which interrupts normality
- Blacks are kept busy with racism - it presents itself as a political possession, or a ghost which continually reappears
- People would obsessively ask, 'where are you from?' in order to hear an exotic story - racism is thus a kind of voyeurism
- This voyeurism can overlap with a modern primitivism, in which the black subject possesses something anterior which whites have lost
- Excitement is what has been lost (postcolonial melancholia)
- This primitivism has been called 'positive' racism because it idealizes the black, but there is nothing positive about it because those constructed as others become embodiments of both sexuality and 'primal' aggression, both of which have been massively repressed for the purpose of civilizational projects
- the 'game of racism' requires both sweet and bitter words, and the entanglement of love and hate
- Dissociation and displacement occurs in white voyeurism, with the depoliticization of texts marked as racial
- Shame and guilt must be differentiated - the moment of shame in whites is a very important moment of recognition of the possibility of plural perspectives
- It is not about morality, but psychic processes. Shame, unlike guilt, can be positive

- Psychoanalysis deals with the human body as an iceberg, with the water level at the eyes, and the subterranean unreason below the brain and the line of sight
- Therefore Kilomba tells politics through subjectivity, in the tradition of Fanon
- The concept of Plantation Memories described memory as embodied in institutions
- Racism is the moment of being abstracted from the present and installed in the past. A mise-en-scene which places the subject in the plantation once again

- A good psychoanalyst asks no questions. Just record the text, and let the analysand associate, layer by layer, into rich details
- Little Red Riding Hood can be used as a narrative of sexual abuse and a way to approach past trauma in children. This is because it contains unconscious codes to symbolize conflicts

Otolith Group Lecture, - Oct 2010

2010-11-02T14:13:00.001-07:00

- The otolith controls balance and orientation in the inner ear
- What happens when you leave this behind, and leave behind gravity?
- Chris Marker provides a methodology to bridge the poetic and the historical, by using a future anterior narrator
- Taking up a mode of exile within the future, because the present proved itself to be impotent and uninhabitable. One way in which it was uninhabitable was that it ignored critique and protest against unjust political policies such as the war
- Making films influenced by Marker was a way of creating shareable emotions - the depression, impotence and anger became shared
- Marker's methodology was non-illustrative
- The films became the meeting place of the postcolonial and the post-communist
- A question of how to make conceptual personae which are both theoretical and artistic at once, with affect, commonality, and the invitation of a shared melancholia

- Through the affective register, any viewer becomes part of a secret communism
- Otolith is strongly influenced by J.G. Ballard's science fiction of the present

- Dwelling within the 'bad new present' rather than the 'good old days'
- Futurity and futurism become a political question in the present. Evidence of this is Bush's politics of pre-emptive war, caught in its own dystopian futural projections

- The work of Karen Mirza and Brad Butler was also important

- The form of the essay-film cancels the distinction between creation and critique, theory and practice. Using image and sound, it registers a common affect of discontent
- The voiceover is the film thinking to itself - telling us nothing, representing nothing, failing productively, making audible the silent voice of reading and thinking
- This is one affect which a video can mobilize in a world with too much video

- Kodwo Eshun grew up in the 'Zone 5' suburbs of London, listening to psychedelic bands like Yes and Gong. He saw the suburbs as a place to plot aesthetic terrorism which is to be unleashed upon the city.
- Otolith is interested in the opacity of the filmic process - creation as a black box and 'essay' as the etymological root in the idea of the 'attempt'

2010-11-02T14:12:00.001-07:00

Deadly danger to any global civilization is no longer likely to come from without. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages. - Hannah Arendt, quoted by Homi K. Bhabha

Otolith Group

2010-11-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Film: Otolith III

Based on the screenplay 'the Alien' by Satyajit Ray

Four figures: the Engineer, the Director, the Journalist, and the Industrialist

The journalist: 'saying why he couldn't, that's what matters'

The Industrialist:
'build, build build'
'make a film for yourself'

Casting passers-by as the figures/characters:
- 'The sense of self-containment is there. He would make a really good director.'

- 'For me, the alien was not a body at all. It was more of a climate, a strange weather.'
- Through the myth of the martian we get a history of exteriority
- 'I need to ask what the nonhuman thinks of us. What do we look like from the alien's perspective?'
-'There is a co-belonging born from the intimate distance of shared solitudes.' We cannot be alone being alone
-'The re-imposition of ancient virtues consists in the re-imposition of terror and fear.' - The Boy who befriends the alien
-'We live in a space of friends' - The Boy
- Cinema takes the side of the image against the honor of the event
-'An idea is only good when it has no power' - Michel Serres
-'Democracy is like happiness-- it is a thing which does not exist, and yet, one day, is no more.'

We believe today that power is not exerted through the people, but that power is a monster which lurks somewhere in a grotto. Every once in a while it eats some children and wreaks havoc. All we can do is write a constitution to try to keep it at bay.

- Cornelius Castoriadis, interviewed by Chris Marker

Catherine Malabou - What is a Psychic Event? Oct 2010

2010-11-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

- Malabou is concerned with the erasure of the frontier between the brain, as physical object, and the psyche
- In order to confront this question we must ask 'what is a psychic event?'
- To answer this question Malabou proposes a new term: cerebrality, in distinction to the brain
- Freud distinguishes between the concept of sex, as used in everyday speech, and sexuality, which refers to a specific form of causality
- Kant describes causality as character (Critique of Pure Reason)
- Sexuality, therefore, is a character which intervenes to regulate a certain series of events
- A psychic event marks a connection between an external event and an internal reaction. Sexuality is the regulating force of this connection. It incorporates the contingency or the accident into the psyche
- Sexuality as a concept which determines the border between inside and outside, the proper and the externality
- Cerebrality is the word for causal value. it encompasses not just conscious life, but also the affective and erotic fabric
- The brain is a site of affects

- Oliver Sacks and other neurologists demonstrate the places of overlap between cerebral and psychic life
- Cerebrality is both cause and character (regime) of events
- Cerebrality has usurped the place of sexuality in neurology. This conflict represents the central disagreement of psychoanalysis and neurology
- Freud wrote that a psychic event has two simultaneous levels. It is both

exogenous AND endogenous
unexpected AND a feature of elaboration and integration by the psyche
in German, Ereignis AND Erlebnis

Sexuality is the encounter between these two levels. They can also be called the level of the incident (nonsensical) and the articulation (sensical)
- Cerebrality functions completely differently
- This is because no interpretation of the cerebral accident, such as brain damage, is possible. There is no Erlebnis event. The accident remains wholly exterior, unassimilable
- Cerebral wounds cut the thread of history in that they reveal the ability of the subject to survive the senselessness of the accident

- They are never accepted by Freud as real: he neutralizes cerebrality
- For Freud, the brain is an 'opague organ'
- In his analysis of the war wounded, it appeared to him that the soldier's real conflict was necessarily a repetition of a previous trauma
- The word trauma comes from the Greek 'to pierce'
- In Freud, the organic lesion never becomes a neurosis. The determining cause can never coincide with the precipitating cause. PTSD is not the same as a neurosis or a psychic disturbance
- In order to constitute psychic events, organic lesions must reactivate previous lived trauma. Neurosis is a 'peacetime conflict' between the ego and the sex drives
- In the end, sexuality will always win over trauma without hermeneutics. There is nothing beyond the causality of the pleasure principle

- Freud believed that brain damaged patients should not be psychoanalyzed lest they become 'common neurotics'
- Could it be that Freud failed to think the accident in addition to the event?
- Cerebrality deals with contingency differently than does sexuality. It allows for the possibility of unprecedented contingent disaster
- We must think the traumatic event that is neutral to fantasy and reason
- Examples of these events include Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, and ADD
- Every wound, as causal, has the power to change personality, but the sense of this change is fundamentally different between psychoanalytic and neurological methods. Where psychoanalysis sees a change in the ego, neurology sees an unprecedented metamorphosis, giving rise to an entirely new person
- The catastrophe defines the event as it defines itself on a psychic level
- The catastrophe radically divides between before and after, in a manner never allowed by Freud

Plasticity consists of three meanings:
1. The possibility of a thing to receive form
2. The possibility to give form to a thing
3. The possibility of the explosion of every form

- Plasticity is situatuted at both extremes of creation and destruction
- The psychic event is plastic on identity, and identity is itself plastic, but not in the first, positive, or 'sculptural' sense of the term, as is often shown in Sacks, with, for example, the patient who is struck by lightning and becomes an accomplished concert pianist
- In fact, the psychic event is only understandable in the third sense, as the destruction of forms
- Destruction might constitute a form of psychic life against Freud

- Freud's view on plasticity is described in his work Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
- He wrote that in psychic life, succession = coexistence
- Therefore that which is plastic is indestructible. Any earlier development can return again
- Can we be so certain that mental illness is always a return?

- The 'new wounded' are not merely those with brain lesions. The 'new wounded' refers to all of those in shock who have experienced neural reorganization due to trauma which is war-related, sexual, or due to another kind of violence
- Perhaps all damage by extreme relational violence such as this is 'socio-political'

- Every event occurs because of an 'indivisible intimacy between the inside and the outside'

- Traumatic events present themselves today as non-intentional: this is an ideological effect. Intention is disguised as natural and contingent causality
- Political oppression today assumes the guise of a traumatic blow which cancels out its political aspect
- This disguising coincides with the global uniformization of neurology and the collapse of the brain and the psyche

Q&A Fragments:

- One consequence of traumatic shock is indifference, odd unconcern, and coldness
- This total suspension of affect, which can be seen in war-torn countries or displaced populations, is similar to PTSD
- In its extreme degree, it is similar to the psychic state of serial killers and extreme psychotics
- The reactions to natural and political traumas are the same
- In cerebral trauma, two different psychic forms emerge
- There is, therefore, always the virtual reality of becoming other to oneself. Whenever I behave indifferently to the other it is a manifestation of who I might become
- Brain damage reveals something that might happen at any time to anyone (Marguerite Duras refers to the contingency of her face...)
- Therefore it is unfair to look at the brain itself as a locus of causality
- Sacks sees plasticity as the making of a beautiful form with a happy ending
- Antonio Damasio: There can be no reasoning without decision, which requires affective evaluation. There is no decision 'in cold blood'
- the traumatic event is both a shock and a promise
- Malabou's event would have no promise - it would be a positive answer to the question 'is there anything beyond the pleasure principle?'

Alexander Garcia Duttmann on Derrida, Adorno, and budget cuts

2010-11-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

I ran to death and death meets up
and all my pleasures are like yesterday
- John Donne

- Current budget crisis: we are facing, in the UK, the cutting of the majority of funds to non-STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects.
- This means that the university has given into a societal notion of measurability and accountability
- Individual academics give in to the cuts because they think that they may avoid being fired
- This would mean not the abolition but the privatization of the humanities and the arts, their relegation to a sphere that is economically unreachable for everyday people

On thinking in Derrida
- How do I relate to a gap? The gap which constitutes thinking...
- thinking is to forgo intelligibility, or to recognize the Geflecht (Adorno), entanglement, abandonment, spacing and logical irreconcilability which is proper to the affirmation of thought
- Being caught between two opposing moments creates a lacuna which can do justice to neither
- Adorno and Derrida share this overall gesture
- Deconstruction relies on a gesture of generalization

2010-10-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

i'm not afraid of al qaeda because they have nothing to do with me.

i'm not afraid of al qaeda because the real terrorists are mostly white people.

2010-03-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

My college posts this picture on their website of "Speedy" Rush, the namesake of our gym, back in the good old days when instead of being an old dead guy he was a young serious guy, wearing an outfit that looks like a ridiculous moon suit but must have been a football uniform. How "speedy" was he compared to Jahvid Best?

cixous

2010-03-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night

Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Sensitive
Logos/Pathos

Form/Matter
Convex/Concave
Step/Ground
Seed/Receptacle
Man/Woman

Bruno Latour

2010-02-18T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Compositionist Manifesto by Bruno Latour questions the centrality of "critique." He argues that the recent fetishization of the notion of critique creates a self-destructive situation, because it posits a true "beyond" which is always-already dismissed. He proposes the idea of composition, which requires that we move from "matters of fact" to "matters of concern," and the possibility of reassembling the social.

2010-02-18T14:51:00.001-08:00

The message of the film 2012 is, again, 99% of people should die so a stupid American family gets together. - Zizek

truth is a woman?

2010-02-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nor anything of woman. Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not.

- Jacques Derrida

2010-02-01T00:55:00.000-08:00

"When you see the man speaking to himself loudly on the street, do not run from him, run toward him, for he is a poet. Fear him only if you fear the truth." - Ted Joans

We fear the truth for the same reason we fear the crazy man on the street: it will not leave us alone, it knows no boundaries, it has no sense of propriety or decency, it denies us what we think to be our dignity, the "white noise" of ideology which tells us white lies about our condition and our states of subjection.

In high doses, truth is demolition and acidic degradation. There is only so much truth that any individual can take, and capitalism allows truth insofar as it allows psychosis: in special cases, for special purposes and only insofar as a function is prescribed for its proper deployment. If the psychotic is a one-woman show on Broadway, a Wesley Willis or a Daniel Johnston, or if the neurotic displays itself gratuitously like Woody Allen, the nobles will give it an allowance so that it can let some pressure off of the masses of people who yearn for certain vicarious moments of obscene lucidity and uncontrollable tremors.

The psychotic is also the drafter of the overall drift of contemporary technologies--what is the department of homeland security if not the wet-dream of a paranoid schizophrenic? Adam Curtis argues, from a cozy foreign perspective, that the United States' Cold War policy, which heavily determined its "War on Terror" policy, was the outgrowth, to a large extent, of the mind of one John Nash, immortalized by Russell Crowe a few years back. Nash created Game Theory, based on the idea of a zero-sum game, where each game concludes with the ultimate defeat of one individual and the domination of another, and this theory was instrumental to the escalation of the arms race and the idea that one must always-already suspect to be betrayed by one's acquaintance. Therefore the neighbor, the friend, the other of any kind becomes the opponent, the enemy.

What Curtis leaves out, or perhaps does not have time to develop, is the fact that the game theory assumption of zero-sum competition was not invented by Nash. Nash can be seen, like Ayn Rand, as an example of a psychotic who is influential because he brings to the surface something implicit. The zero-sum assumption has been at play juridically for centuries, with the idea of innocent vs. guilty in a court of law.

The zero-sum assumption relies on an ultimate, overall authority which finally completes the ruling of a smaller authority (such as a judge) and realizes this ruling. It relies on the idea that power is not fluid, that it resides in an unseen but infinitely high place, above the grasp of ordinary people, no matter how organized or numerous they may be.

2009-12-14T17:21:00.001-08:00

Within a three-block radius, there are no fewer than four businesses selling ice cream, gelato, and/or frozen yogurt. The families go for ice cream, the dates/gourmets go to the gelato place, and everyone else (especially those with gym memberships) go to the frozen yogurt places to watch their weight.

Every time I come home and walk down this street, the businesses are selling new things, things I haven't always heard of, and usually things that I imagine I would never buy. This is how I can tell that this street is robustly business-savvy: not only are there businesses every few feet, but when they shut down they (usually) are replaced within weeks by another business selling something else. They are often selling esoteric things to appeal to the esoteric tastes of the strollers, things like "foot reflexology" (for which there was an information kiosk). The new smash-hit sensation, since about 2008, has been tapas, kind of the Spanish version of sushi, which I have not been able to bring myself to eat. Each tapa costs between $8 and $10, and apparently you are supposed to order several of them.

The only thing preventing this street from falling into gourmet strip mall chaos is that its "small town atmosphere," often touted, is solidifed by the ceremonial presence of certain anachronisms. A church, a cobbler, with an actual metal shoe sign, and an antique shop that supported McCain in '08.

Oh you got a man? Well, you need a richer one.

2009-11-29T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to a mixtape today and the MC says "You know when you're really doing something? You're really doing something when you put 10 G's on fantasy football. That's when you know you made it." Something about it struck a chord with me, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. My immediate reaction was laughing, because it's a ridiculous statement, a ridiculous boast, and it displays the sense of "I am who I am and I'm not apologizing for it" that is such a trademark of hip hop, and, increasingly, American culture in general, at least when it comes to lavish displays of wealth.

And of course, part of me thought, that's actually tragic that he's saying that, because even if he's joking and he didn't do that (unlikely), some father might hear that and waste money that could go to his child's education.

But then there's the part of me that understands where the MC is coming from, that understands where everyone is coming from when they find a way to make money and are proud of it, because they thought they lived in a world where, no matter what, they couldn't make it. But it made me also think of the other, less hopeful side of the American Dream. Millions of people, convinced that they can beat the odds, transcend the limitations of their environments, and "make it," which is always closely allied with making money, start acting like they've already beaten the odds, spending money on things they can't afford, whether it's a new house, a new car, or a shopping spree, when that money could have gone to better food or education or health insurance.

I know that this problem would be less dramatic if people weren't fed massive amounts of bullshit from popular entertainment which tells them that they're irrelevant, inferior, and basically worthless unless Robin Leach is narrating their lives. It's really striking when you look at Asian women having eye surgery and Black women putting deadly chemicals in their hair so they can more closely resemble that idea of beauty which is so closely allied with wealth.

A lot of the problem comes from the consumption compulsion, the basic human response to scarcity. It's the desire to obtain the object of one's desire immediately, without any delay. This is the very desire which is encouraged on a daily basis by the marketing industry: Bad credit? No credit? How can you say no to this deal? At 75% off you're basically losing money not buying it? Imagine how popular you'll be!

When the recession hit, I started thinking, 'what good can come out of this?' Because it's bound to stay with us for a little while, anyway, so we should take stock of everything and think about what the positive consequences of it might be. And I started thinking maybe it would cause people to be more conscientious, to be more resourceful. Maybe people would be more efficient with the way they spend their money, from the poorest people to (most importantly) the federal government, putting resources into education and jobs and other necessities instead of bullshit. Bullshit for rich people is war, "homeland security," a lot of things.

But there's part of me that looks at our society and thinks, well, in any other society before the United States, people would do that. They would put their resources into things that offer long term benefits, rather than short term ones. But there's something about the US of A that is so obsessed with winning, with beating the other person in every possible area just to show that we're the best, that makes me hesitate. And maybe that's a good thing-- maybe it means that we do it for a love of the game and we actually have learned to enjoy the simple things in life like flatscreen televisions and diamonds. Or maybe (and this is what I actually hope), we'll have the courage to alter the way we look at status and value in general, to be able to look at someone and not judge them immediately if they don't approximate our (store-bought) notion of success and worth.

No matter what you may think, and no matter what your family or friends might tell you, you can't buy self-worth. And therefore, there is nobody on earth who can't afford it. Some of the poorer women I've met are actually much more beautiful than some of the richer ones I've met, because they know their beautiful and they're not threatened by that possibility. And when you love yourself, you take good care of yourself and those around you. So instead of boasting about what we have, we should boast about what we've done. Pretty soon, nobody will care about what you have because the American Dream will have evaporated before their eyes. There will be multiple American Dreams, not just the one that marketing built. "A person who never dreamed would be dead in a week."

Open Letter to the Discovery Channel

2009-11-05T18:59:00.001-08:00

Dear Representative,

First, I would like to thank you for your program "Gang Wars: Oakland." I am writing to let you know how much it means to us Oakland residents that the longstanding problems of our city are finally being addressed. Ideally, I would like to participate in a focus group or somehow give feedback to the producers of this segment, because I really would like to have a chance to let them know my opinions.

While I am very grateful that you have chosen Oakland as the subject of a program, I was struck by the polemical tone of the production. While this is certainly an occasion for heartfelt messages, I strongly disagree with the narrator's assertion that the 8-man Police Task Force on gangs is our "only hope." The Oakland Police and municipal government have asserted since the 80's that this is in fact not at all true--it is, rather, the responsibility of citizens such as myself who have been personally affected by homicide to build relations with law enforcement and between citizens in order to tackle this problem.

I know that the producers of the show may have been aware of this--that the 8-man task force is not actually our "only hope"--but they may have figured, perhaps with a keen entrepreneurial spirit, that the mostly-suburban viewers of Discovery would respond with more excitement to the idea of a select few versus thousands. Indeed, this image conjures any number of popular action and war movies, from Rambo to Kill Bill, and is very much a part of the American popular imagination.

But, speaking as a person who has seen the intimate relationship between social policies, which destroy communities by starving them of the most basic resources like education, and homicide, I do not appreciate the metaphor of Oakland as an action movie. In order to do justice to Oakland, or any other city whose plight is similar, one would need to show that the people dying are real people, not extras with squibs, and that their families and communities are torn asunder by their premature deaths.

It is my dream that Discovery and its affiliates could produce television that gives more of a voice to the people involved in the battlezone that is the American ghetto. We must collaborate on this.

Safety Joe

2009-08-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

In this post, the author writes,

"living in a place like Oakland forces every one of us to subconsciously deal with race every day.
Like many cities, Oakland is virtually color-coded. It’s a largely segregated city, with Black regions in the West and East of the city, Hispanic areas on down International Blvd, etc.

Anyone who looks at the statistics knows the risk of being victimized by crime is also a color-coded situation. I remember reading somewhere that, if a Black and non-Black man pass each other on the street, the Black man has 1/500 the probability of being assaulted by the non-Black as vice-versa.

Knowing facts like these, it would be irrational for a white man to ignore race when walking around Oakland."

I responded,

I am a white man who grew up in Oakland and has lived here his whole life. The problem with your article is that from the get-go it is framed as though whiteness is some kind of innocent, vulnerable quality.

I don't know where you found that 1/500 statistic, but even if it true, do you know how miniscule the chances of you getting killed by a black man are? Sure, you might get your wallet stolen if you're in the wrong place, but the chances of you getting murdered are tiny. Want some evidence? Take a look at this map:
http://extras.insidebayarea.com/s-ang-graphics/MURD04.pdf

How many white people are on this list? Exactly two, out of 114. Seeing as how there are more white people in Oakland than there are Blacks (34% versus 30%), that might allow us to recognize that it is much more dangerous to be Black in Oakland than to be white.

Here is a quote from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics:
"Blacks accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2005, but were victims in 15% of all nonfatal violent crimes and nearly half of all homicides."

I'm not saying this to solicit your guilt. I hope, rather, that this will alleviate some of your attachment to the thought that we can and should move "beyond race." Clearly, this is not going to happen anytime soon. A good example of this is the fact that, living in Oakland, white people are pretty much safe from murder. Yes, there are exceptions, and the possessions of white people, which are many and valuable, are certainly not safe. But you need to realize that the reason race is an issue is because it actually brings with it enormous life-and-death consequences, and not just for the white man.

Centralia, PA

2009-08-14T01:56:00.000-07:00

“

This was a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees. Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers.

”

Centralia was incorporated as a borough in 1866. The anthracite coal industry was the principal employer in the community. Coal mining continued in Centralia until the 1960s, when most of the companies went out of business. Bootleg mining continued until 1982. Strip and open-pit mining is still active in the area, and there is an underground mine employing about 40 employees three miles to the west.

The borough was also a hotbed of Molly Maguires activity during the 1860s and 1870s. The borough's founder, Alexander Rea, was one of the victims of the secret order when he was murdered just outside of the borough on October 17, 1868. Three individuals were convicted of the crime and hanged in the county seat of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania on March 25, 1878. Several other murders and arsons also occurred during this period.

The borough was served by two railroads, the Philadelphia and Reading and the Lehigh Valley, with the Lehigh Valley being the principal carrier. Rail service ended in 1966. The borough operated its own school district with elementary schools and a high school within its precincts. There were also two Catholic parochial schools in the borough. The borough once had seven churches, five hotels, twenty-seven saloons, two theatres, a bank, post office, and fourteen general and grocery stores. During most of the borough's history, when coal mining activity was being conducted, the town had a population in excess of 2,000 residents. Another 500 to 600 residents lived in unincorporated areas immediately adjacent to Centralia.

It is not known for certain how the fire that made Centralia essentially unlivable was ignited. One theory asserts that in May 1962, Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. The firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire, and let it burn for a time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not extinguished.

Other evidence supports this theory, as stated in Joan Quigley's 2007 missive, such as the fact that one of two trash haulers (Curly Stasulevich or Sam Devine) dumped hot ash and/or coal discard from coal burners into the open trash pit. The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer but had fallen behind. This action allowed the hot coals to penetrate the vein of coal underneath the pit and subsequent subterranean fire. Quigley cites "interviews with volunteer firemen, the former fire chief, borough officials, and several eyewitnesses, as well as contemporaneous borough council minutes" as her sources for this explanation of the fire. Another theory of note is the Bast Theory. Basically, it states that the fire was burning long before the alleged trash dump fire. However, due to overwhelmingly contrary evidence, few hold this position and give it little credibility.

The fire remained burning underground and spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adverse health effects were reported by several people due to the byproducts of the fire, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and lack of healthy oxygen levels.

In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner and then mayor, John Coddington, inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old resident Todd Domboski fell into a subsidence four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard.

In 1984, Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from state officials.

In 1992, Pennsylvania claimed eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2002, the United States Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP Code, 17927.

Today

Only one home remains standing in Centralia although most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished by humans or nature. At a casual glance the area now appears to be a field with many paved streets running through it. Some areas are being filled with new-growth forest. Most of Centralia's roads and sidewalks are overgrown with brush, although some areas appear to be mowed.The remaining church in the borough which used to hold weekly Saturday night services remains silent in the bowels of Centralia, and the borough's four cemeteries are slowly crumbling due to the carbon monoxide of the long burning underground fire. Centralia's cemeteries now have a far greater population than the town, including one on the hilltop that has smoke rising around and out of it.

The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres (1.6 km²), spreading along four fronts, are low round metal steam vents in the south of the borough, and several signs warning of underground fire, unstable ground, and carbon monoxide. Additional smoke and steam can be seen coming from an abandoned portion of Pennsylvania Route 61, the area just behind the hilltop cemetery, and other cracks in the ground scattered about the area. Route 61 was repaired several times until its final closing. The current route was a detour around the damaged portion during the repairs and became a permanent route in the mid-1990s; mounds of dirt were placed at both ends of the former route, effectively blocking the road. Pedestrian traffic is still possible due to a small opening about two feet wide at the north side of the road, but this is muddy and not accessible to the disabled. The underground fire is still burning and will continue to do so for a predicted 250 more years.

Prior to its demolition in September of 2007, the last remaining house was notable for the five chimney-like support buttresses along each of two opposite sides of the house, where the house was previously supported by a row of adjacent buildings before it was demolished. Another house with similar buttresses is visible from the northern side of the cemetery, just north of the burning, partially subsumed hillside.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania did not renew the relocation contract at the end of 2005, and the fate of the remaining residents is uncertain.

It is expected that many former residents will return in 2016 to open a time capsule buried in 1966 next to the veterans' memorial.

2009-08-03T00:10:00.001-07:00

The pastor said, 'People come to me all the time and say they're at rock bottom. I can't get no lower. This is the worst it could be. They are wrong. It could always get worse, because even if you're crawling on your hands and knees, you're still above ground. Praise Jesus. And some people think that I just say that because I've never been to jail. That may be, but I've done things that could send me to jail. Yes I have. I've just never been caught. But I'd much rather have a clean conscience. Because when you're drivin' and you're dirty, and the police come up behind you, ain't nothin worse than that because guilt is on your shoulder. And when you hear a car backfire you duck because you're convinced that's a gunshot. But when you get clean, then you hope the police will stop you cause ain't nothin there to find. I hope the police see us right here, right now, with nothing to hide. Praise the lord, Amen.'

2009-07-30T00:07:00.000-07:00

12:04 AM
The groom, Michael, was a hulking man, at least 350 pounds heavy, but his soft features made him look approachable, even friendly. His fade was neatly trimmed for the occasion, and he wore a sharp yellow tie along with his male peers. The cook had told me that Michael was a graduate. Michael’s wife was a tall, robust, but not obese white woman, who looked average-sized only next to her husband. I approached Michael as he left the dance floor, heaving and sweating, removing his tie.

“Congratulations, man.”

“Thanks, thank you.”

“I heard you graduated from here.”

“I did, class of 2000. And you?”

I told him I graduated this year, 2009. He immediately began to give me a life talk, which I hadn’t expected. He spoke exactly like a sports coach, trying to boost my morale.

“Hey, look, man, I know it’s tough right now, but give it a few years—just give it three, four years and you’ll realize that it was worth it. Your education here is just gonna put you ahead and you’re gonna be successful. I mean myself, all my friends who are here with me, they all went here too, and they’re all successful.”

He paused and seemed to lose his thought for a moment, then added. “and not just economically successful, you know, they’re….in other ways, too.”

The girl standing to my right, holding a large tray of dirty dishes, from the central CA suburbs with acne like I used to have, asked him, “what do you do?”

“I’m a corporate lawyer—I represent investment firms in New York.”

3:03 PM
Despite her frantic gestures, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we needed seventeen tables, eight chairs per table. That was what she seemed to say, but the language barrier, as usual, made it tough. I thought I could learn Punjabi, but that would take a long time.

9:55 PM
Leaving my second break and my second meal—the most decadent food I had eaten in a long time, part of the spread in the room off the patio that included beef flank, spinach mozzarella salad, mashed potatoes, grilled vegetables, and rolls—I returned to the room where the buffet had been, looking to see if anyone was still getting food. There was enough food left to feed another wedding reception, but all the guests had left for the dance floor except for one man, who I recognized from the afternoon when he had eaten probably 30 coconut shrimp with orange sauce that I had brought him on a plate. Every time I offered them to him he made a joke like “don’t you go nowhere now, you and I are gonna be good friends,” “I got my eye on you, brother.” There was another man, who introduced himself to me as Jason, who said similar things and took a similar number of shrimp, but the first man gradually distinguished himself to me as less respected in the family, kind of a loner, a strange guy. He seemed to be using me and the shrimp as a distraction from the others around him who didn’t really care about what he had to say, whereas Jason was a family man and was constantly talking to the other guests.

So this more awkward guy was sitting on the couch behind the buffet table, eating a big plate of beef and gravy. He looked happy to see me. “Have a seat, my man. Have something to eat.”

I sat down and lay back on the couch, touching my full stomach. “No room. I just ate so much.”

“So you went to school here?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just graduated.” I told him about my major.

He stopped eating for a second, and looked at me with an intense, serious look. “Did that have anything to do with law?”

“Yeah, actually, a lot of people from my major applied to law school, and one of my professors—“

“Now, what do you know about law?”

“Not too much…I have some interest in it but I don’t think I’ll go to law school.”

“Alright, here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna help me with a situation I got.”

I listened closely, for a few reasons. I could tell that he actually did need help, although I wasn’t sure what kind. I was avoiding work. And there was another reason, which I couldn’t figure out at the moment.

“My mother just died a couple of weeks ago.”

I started to express sympathy, but he just kept talking, looking at his plate.

“She had a lot of property, and my brothers and sisters are taking it. Look at me, and you can tell I ain’t the smartest guy. I got a mental problem. But I know what’s mine is mine. And they tryin’ to fuck me. And they been tryin’ to fuck me ever since we was kids.”

“So the property belongs to you?”

“Yeah! Look, they been callin me and telling me im so intelligent recently. They been telling me I’m smart now. Aint never told me that before, but now that they tryin to fuck me, they lyin to me.” He looked at me with an intense stare and started talking as though I was his brother or sister. “motherfucker how are you gonna tell me I’m smart now? And you always knew I had a problem.”

I just nodded and agreed, even though I had no real idea what he was talking about. I was becoming less sure if I could help.

“Basically, they just don’t respect me and they never have. And they tryin to fuck me. They think I’m too stupid to handle my business. So ima have to fuck them first.”

He smiled for the first time, a big smile. He was looking at me without looking at me. Looking in my direction but off in the distance past me. “And that’s where you come in,” he said, as though solving an elaborate puzzle. “I need to get me some smart fuckin’ honkies with degrees to deal with this shit. Only a honky can do this type of shit.”

“well, you know, I don’t have a law degree or anything…”

“that shit don’t matter. I just need some cold-blooded, educated, white motherfuckers to put the fear of God into them. You need to get me some of them.”

“I try to avoid cold-blooded lawyers.”

“Yeah, but you know them.” He was right. “See,” he added, “they won’t listen to a black man, but they’ll listen to a white man.”

“That’s sad…”

“This aint about sad! It’s about money.”

Many emotions are opposites, like sadness and happiness. But anger has no opposite.

Does philosophy matter?

2009-06-16T05:22:00.000-07:00

"There are philosophies that we're living by even though we don't know it. That's what ideology is. Like the emphasis right now on being in a post-ideological era is ideological." - Astra Taylor

It's not hard, at first, to claim that philosophy is dead, irrelevant, lacks pragmatic application, is ineffectual, etc. This is because you can't touch any one thing made by philosophy. You can pick up a cell phone or walk on a suspension bridge and say "this is made by physics and engineering." You can take your Prozac or Benedryl and say "this is made by biology and chemistry." You could receive your stimulus check and say "this is made by public policy." But there is no single item that you can easily link back to philosophy as a discipline, and this is why people are so hard on it.

This approach in general is strange, because it relies on commodities, but let's pretend that it's important. Philosophy appears nowhere because it appears everywhere, or because it grounds the possibility of everything. It will not show its face in our small lives, but it looms in the background the whole time like Kaonashi AKA No Face:

By that I mean that it persists, with an eerie silence, behind our everyday lives and their frivolities. Every so often one remembers that our cell phones are manufactured in sweatshops by laborers who work for less than minimum wage not just because, but because many of their governments tried to become self-governing and end their colonial rule and they are still being punished for this. And these efforts at self-government were nearly always associated with the thought of one Karl Marx, who was a philosopher in the Continental tradition, the side of philosophy which is generally snubbed nowadays.

It's not that philosophy doesn't matter: it's that the impact of philosophy is something which we would like to forget, because it gets in the way of our innocent obliviousness. Philosophy is dead which allows it to live on in a multiple fashion.

Bad Philosophy - Harris and Singer

2009-06-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

The question of perspective is one of the most important in philosophy today, and the way in which actions change depending on the alignment of objects is crucial to contemporary research into ethics.

Sam Harris and Peter Singer would appear to be at opposite ends of a spectrum. Singer is an ethical vegetarian and human-rights activist, a man who dedicates himself to philosophically grounding these beliefs. Harris is a staunch atheist, part of the Dawkins-Dennett Atheists Alliance, fond of arguing that Islam is "innately violent." But there is something about their method of argumentation that is deeply linked.

In his The End of Faith, which engages readers by discussing "religion, terror, and the future of reason" as if they were characters on Friends, Harris refers to the "moon illusion," or the mistaken belief held by some ancient societies that the moon was actually small, because it appears small from earth. He uses the moon illusion as an analogy to describe what he calls the "ethical illusion" of opposing torture as a institutional practice. It is much easier for us to endorse mass bombings than to endorse the torture of one person, which, according to Harris, could prevent the necessity of mass bombings and deaths. Therefore, he concludes, we should lift the veil and recognize the necessity of torture and the childishness of our bias against it.

In Astra Taylor's excellent documentary Examined Life, Peter Singer explains a thought experiment which he considers central to his theory. Suppose you are walking by a shallow pond in which a child appears to be drowning, and there are no other adults in sight. You are wearing nice shoes, and saving the child, although it would pose no bodily harm to you, would ruin the shoes. Would it not be reasonable to save the child anyway? Singer says that almost everyone he talks to responds that they would save the child despite ruining their shoes, so then Singer delivers the coup de grace: why would you not donate money to OxFam or UNICEF, which could just as easily save the lives of children, instead of spending your money on other things?

These analogies are like cotton candy: they are compelling, easy to manufacture, and ultimately unsatisfying and unhealthy. They each contain a kernel of truth: in Sam Harris' argument the fact that people fail to comprehend the enormity of actions such as mass bombings which require little exertion on behalf of the attacker, and in Peter Singer's argument the fact that people in late capitalism spend their money on useless drivel and that relief organizations could use the money. But their bogusness lies in collapsing these truths into cheap political sloganeering-- laypeople who agree with Harris can simply support waterboarding and Guantanamo as well as mass bombings, and laypeople who agree with Singer can simply donate a few bucks per paycheck to UNICEF while consuming all of the same products. These are not political solutions because they are responding to bad philosophy.

Visibility

2009-05-31T02:48:00.001-07:00

Look at the man in the in the middle of the picture. He is Jack Kemp, but he could be anybody, with luck and hard work. He is providing a public image of himself to the media. He looks cool and composed, but his eyebrows are furrowed to show his genuine concern about a particular issue. Around him are buzzing lots of supplements to his public identity, and lots of signs of his prominence. His name adorns his surroundings.

Look at the faces of the people surrounding him. The fat man with the sunglasses, the wiry confused-looking man behind him. The only person who looks bored is the police officer (or security guard?) behind Jack Kemp. That's because his presence is symbolic: it keeps order through its non-intrusiveness, through his absolute refusal to call attention to himself, to act only if someone else acted incorrectly. Almost every large social occasion has many employed workers whose job it is to be invisible, to be nonintrusive. This is especially apparent when, at a club or concert where everyone in the crowd is dancing and moving, the security guards maintain an absolute stone-cold stoicism, and create an expression on their faces which is harsher than usual, to remind themselves that they are not meant to be enjoying the music.

The only moment of visibility is when something goes wrong.

'The speed of the train and the uneventful trip of the passenger are entirely dependent on the complete obedience of the places that are traversed -and also of course on the smooth functioning of the train companies' organization, running, as the saying goes, "like clockwork".' - Bruno Latour, "Trains of Thought"