Archive for March 2007
first person (plural) shooter
(Xposted to Long Sunday)
I’m sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they’d go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness – the mortal seriousness – of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.
It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: “They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives.”
What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy – it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.
And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines’ position? Why?
Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the “insurgents” don’t fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.
“a fair share for all of us”
Another brilliant post at Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy one that happens to be indirectly apropos of so much that I’ve been saying on here. Go read it. Here’s the start:
Perhaps the most irksome element of ideology as currently practised is the belief that in the face of climate change the individual can make a difference. Hence the moronic plaint of various charities in sundry adverts that by not overfilling the kettle, or by not leaving your telly on standby, you can help avert the holocaust that rising temperatures will cause in the global south. What this serves to occlude is that the only measure that could really avert this is massive cutbacks in private cars, Rationing and some form of Central Planning: by curbing the individual, in other words.
(This lovely poster I’ve brought over… Interesting to think about the way that the relationship between the photo-hands and the abstract infographic image actually enacts the relationship between the individual and the state under planning….)
laissez-faire redistribution
Eduardo Porter does the math in the Times today:
The mortgage interest deduction, the biggest single subsidy to homeowners, will cost the federal budget about $80 billion this year, according to the administration’s projections. Deductions for state and local property taxes will cost $15.5 billion.
Allowing homeowners to pocket tax-free much of the profit from selling their homes is expected to cost $37 billion more. Altogether, this amounts to almost 5 percent of the federal government’s total tax revenue, and almost three times HUD’s entire $42 billion budget. Now even some in Washington are questioning the soundness of pushing homeownership so broadly.
And just so we’re clear on who benefits:
Part of the reason is the structure of government subsidies, which are worth very little to low-income families but quite a bit to families with big incomes. Those well-off families typically do not need government support to buy a home but use it to buy bigger places than they would otherwise purchase.
The mortgage interest deduction alone is worth about $21,000 to a taxpayer in the highest bracket of income with a $1 million mortgage. But for a typical family that bought, say, a $220,000 house with 20 percent down, the break is worth about $1,600.
do i contradict myself? very well, i contradict myself.
My magazine budget is large, my rack contains multitudes.
I just a) resubscribed to Radical Philosophy and b) started a new subscription to Monocle.
I finally got myself a copy of the latter in a relatively unlikely place, a Barnes and Noble in the silly resort town on the west coast of Florida where I was staying. My wife said she saw tears well up in my eyes when I grabbed it from the magazine display.
I am a print junkie, despite all this on-line tapping about.
And if I could figure out the secret link between the two journals I plunked down, oh, well, let’s not name the price, my work would basically write itself.
roman abramovich has always owned chelsea
I don’t get much of a chance to read the UK papers, but today I bought a copy of of the “other” Times at JFK on the way home from our little warm-weather break. Roman Abramovich features much more centrally in the news cycles over there due to his ownership of Chelsea – we don’t get all that much on him over here – he’s strictly page 10 type stuff in the US, once a quarter or so…
He’s getting divorced, apparently, and there are a series of articles on just how much his ex will take. The headspinning, nausea-inducing aspect of all of this, of course, of course, is the fact that what we’re talking about is a divorce that divides up a large chunk of the fruits of the once publicly-owned assets and institutions of the USSR.
Mrs Abramovich appeared well-placed to become the world’s richest divorcée with her choice of property, Old Masters and opulent trinkets from the oligarch’s fortune. His empire was financed from his interests in the former state-owned natural assets of his once-communist homeland, notably oil and aluminium. Nobody has explained exactly how a Muscovite orphan rose from being a black-market toy trader to put the Duke of Westminster in the shade, but he clearly knows how to strike a deal.
A story that really can’t be told, here nor there, without fissuring several columnar stories of the hurray! End of History and the cancellation of the evil injustice that was communism.
Well, whatever else you can say about the fall of the soviet empire, at least the money’s being well spent.
£10.8bn Estimated total value of his fortune
£7.5bn Amount he and partners received for stake in Sibneft oil company in 2005
£1bn Holdings in Russian industry, including food and pharmaceuticals
£2bn Dividends from Sibneft and sales of stakes in other companies, such as aluminium holdings
£28m Six-storey house off Sloane Square, London
£189m Value of yachts: Pelorus, Esctasea, Le Grand Bleu, Sussurro
£119m Value of private Boeing 767 jet, Boeing business jet, and helicopter fleet
£12m Fryning Estate in West Sussex
£15m Château de la Croe in France
£1m Value of his and hers Maybach 62 limousines
Relatedly, turning back to the NY Times, I find this:
…which will replace this:
For fairly obvious reasons, I’m generally not very big on the idea of academic work / scholarship as an effort to preserve the best that was thought and said (and built) during dark times, etc etc etc. But it is nonetheless true that my youngest students this year were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, even if they weren’t really cognizant of much, globo-politically speaking, during their wonder years, they certainly didn’t grow up with even the slightest inkling that another world was once thought possible, even really built, if only perversely, half-way or worse. Efforts both intentional and automatic are underway to shred this alternative space down rubble for landfill, the stuff that the mall pictured above will rest upon but never portray.
free trade / one way street
One roadblock in the Bush-Silva ethanol talks is a 54-cent tariff the United States has imposed on every gallon of ethanol imported from Brazil. Bush says it’s not up for discussion.
Go figure.
hallward
Interesting summary of a Peter Hallward seminar entitled entitled ‘Dialectical Volunterism’ up at An und für sich. Here’s a slice:
He began by re-stating his conviction, present in his Deleuze book, that the choice for philosophers is still to contemplate or change the world. It is clear that this is not a hard duality, as contemplating the world is the very beginning of any attempt to change it. The urge to change the world comes about when we examine the world, how we think it will make sense and find that it does not make sense. In this way, Hallward said, the world is a scandal for philosophy. He related this to liberation theology, which he has been reading as of late, where the liberationists were presented with ‘poverty and the sinful structures surronding it’. At this point there must be a decision of the collective will to change the world. This became a point of contention for Neil Turnbull, a radical sociologist in the audience, as one could read this as a reactionary motif and not at all a revolutionary one. However Peter Hallward wants us to leave behind Adorno and Marcuse as our model for revolutionary leftist change and embrace Lenin, Mao, Aristide, Chavez, etc. In actuality Hallward betrays himself on this point for he did not discuss Lenin or Mao and his discussion of Haiti, while generally pro-Aristide, focused on the work of Paul Farmer and the reclimation of unused land in the industrial belt for youth football by another private citizen. Despite his seeming pro-State logic in ‘The Politics of Prescription’ it is obvious from this talk that his own position is closer to Hardt and Negri than he may want to admit.
loss of methodological rigor
Near the start of Barthes’s lectures on the Neutral:
I hope (I dare to believe ) that my topic is not so manic, for I took the Neutral for a walk not along the grid of words but along a network of readings, which is to say, of a library […] Then, what library? That of my vacation home, which is to say, a place-time where the loss in methodological rigor is compensated for by the intensity and the pleasure of free reading.
I negotiate with myself constantly about my own reading patterns. There is this horrible image that my wife and I cackle about sometimes. We were at one of my tenured colleagues’ house for dinner, one of the first dinners we had here. She took the baby upstairs to breastfeed, and they shuffled her (graciously, graciously) into their bedroom as a good spot for that sort of thing. And she noticed once there, stacked right next to the bed, an enormous stack of books, obviously his bedtime reading. X in the Victorian Y. X, Y, and the Victorian Z. A in the Victorian B. C and D in the Victorian Moment. That sort of thing.
The fact that we cackle about this marks us as who we are. My wife can get away with this sort of attitude, as she’s not an academic, but me? Look, I read the stuff, but not as willingly as what simply drifts up to me, what lands on the shelf of to be reads without direct professional import.
More important: almost every good idea I’ve ever had has come to be out of the random shuffling of books and websites, newspaper articles and other junk that I read irresponsibly. It is no wonder, really, that Barthes is one of my favorites, one of my great teachers, even if I’m gearing up to write something very nasty about him, his politics, the relationship between his aesthetics and his politics (or lack thereof…) But, really, I shouldn’t be reading him tonight.
adbusters and the “existential divide”
(xposted to Long Sunday)
I wasn’t quite a charter subscriber to Adbusters, but fairly close to it. Maybe issue 10 or so, if memory serves. I cancelled about a year ago. While it has a certain connection to some of my perennial interests (see the name of my personal blog), I just started to feel increasingly out of touch with, what was it, the tone, the tonal politics, and the plain old politics of the magazine.
Here’s part of a post salvaged from my old site, just about when I wrote Adbusters to cancel out:
I’ve always been unsettled – in the wrong way – by the approach to politics embraced by Adbusters and the like. Seems to me to be an infinitely foreseeable adaptation of left politics to the self-help, self-fulfillment culture that marks the current tidal mark of the American experiment. Marie Antoinette-ism… What the magazine prescribes for its readership is something other than politics, I think. At base, it’s a strange sort of “lifestyle” magazine. It is full of stuff like this, from the current issue…
Here in rural Telemark, Norway, my husband and I have an ancient, 100-acre farm without a road, without electricity, without running water, without a computer or mobile telephone or washing machine or CD player or remote-control carrot-dicer… without corporate products, including Barbie dolls or Nike sneakers. We have a fjord-horse to do most of the heavy farm work (and so on…)
And a subscription to Adbusters, it would seem…
Anyway, they sell the magazine at the snazzy co-op where I buy my food, and the other day I bought a copy to see if anything has changed, either about the magazine or about me or both.
Nope.
Right from the first pages – which feature a “visual essay” by Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor – I found some material that I can only classify as disturbing, symptomatic, symptomatically disturbing. Here are a few snips:
news roundup from dystopia
Authorities said the girl’s parents put her in a crib next to their bed early Sunday and awoke a few hours later when a heart and breathing monitor alarm went off. The 4-week-old baby, which had been born prematurely, was lying in a pool of blood with her nose and part of her upper lip chewed off.
****
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If his family had not lost its Medicaid.
If Medicaid dentists weren’t so hard to find.
If his mother hadn’t been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.
By the time Deamonte’s own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George’s County boy died.
***
bizarro
From the NYT:
“I don’t think Brazil will accept the idea of being any type of American surrogate in the region, or to moderate or contain Chávez,” said Felipe Lampreia, Brazil’s foreign minister from 1995 to 2001. “But the United States wants to bolster Lula as a counterweight, to show that you can have a leftist government with a strong focus on social issues, income distribution and poverty reduction, without being radical.”
banned in china (thread)
(xposted to Long Sunday)
Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber has banned abb1 from further comments on any threads that he authors. I’d rather not rehash the entire issue at hand, so go take a look and come back.
From what I can tell, the tipping point seems to have been reached with a comment of abb1’s on the Tiananmen Square revolt and suppression of 1989.
Marc: remember the students in TS?
Funny, though, that according to wikipedia:
Although the initial protests were made by students and intellectuals who believed that the Deng Xiaoping reforms had not gone far enough and China needed to reform its political systems, they soon attracted the support of urban workers who believed that the reforms had gone too far.
Obviously there are many more urban workers than students and intellectuals, so, why don’t you hold your venom and think about this one for a few seconds.
This drew quite a negative response from several of the other commenters. But, as I’ve said in the comment thread in question, everything that I’ve read – and I’m not an expert, just an amateur – indicates that the story of the June 4th Movement and the suppression of it was quite a bit more complex than “they wanted democracy, votes and Levi jeans, and the commies ran them over with tanks.”
From, for instance, an interview with Wang Hui in One China, Many Paths (2003):
In 1989, why did the citizens of Beijing respond so strongly and actively to the student demonstrations? It was largely because of the adventurist reforms to the price system that Zhao Ziyang had twice imposed, without any benefit to ordinary people. Their earnings suffered from the agreements they were forced to sign by factories, and their jobs were at risk. People felt the inequality created by the reforms: there was real popular anger in the air. That is why the citizenry poured onto the streets in support of the students. The social movement was never simply a demand for political reform, it also sprang from a need for economic justice and social equality. The democracy that people wanted was not just a legal framework, it was a compreshensive social value (64-65).
It seems clear that this point is at least open for discussion, but, it seems that challenging the conventional wisdom on sacred moments of the end of political history, like Tiananmen Square, provokes a flailing response from the Timberites… In short, an inappropriate response…
after-school activities
(xposted to Long Sunday…)
In a post about a post in praise of a critique of a supposed revival of the SDS at American University, Michael Kazin notes the lack of student protest at Georgetown, where he teaches:
But activists who don’t focus on electoral politics–or, as in the late ’60s and early ’70s, flip off the major parties altogether–seem far less numerous. At Georgetown, where I teach, pleasant spring and fall mornings bring out a dozen or so tables on the bricked-in quad (known as “Red Square” for its color, not the shading of its politics). Small knots of students promote pro-choice and pro-life and a living wage, recruit for various ethnic and race-based clubs, and sing the virtues of tutoring homeless children or teaching in an inner-city school. Hardly anyone on campus still defends the war in Iraq; even a student of mine who once interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib thinks the invasion was a stupid mistake. Still, it’s been months since I saw or heard a single undergrad seek to channel that sentiment into protest. If anyone is trying to organize a local SDS chapter, they must be doing it exclusively on line.
One reads articles like this quite frequently, and certainly it’s hard not to agree that there is a distinct disinvestment in protest culture at US universities. This is not to say that there aren’t mobilized, engaged students – there certainly are. But, in my experience, like Kazin’s, what protest there is seems to be limited to a very small subsector of the student body – a sort of special interest club like any other special interest club. There are small demonstrations, there are ubiquitous photocopies plastered on doors and walls, there are meetings and listservs and discussion groups and hosted speakers. But it never seems to grow or make much of a dent.
So the first item for discussion: do you think this is an accurate rendition of the situation at universities, at your university, if you’re at one? Or is it stupid to fixate so strongly on what happens on campuses in the first place? We are used to thinking of students as the shock troops of revolt and protest, but this hasn’t always – or even often – been the case when you take a slightly wider historical perspective.
Second item for discussion: Why don’t articles like this ever try to make a real stab at why protest culture is now so anemic at universities? One either throws up one’s hands (“politics have changed, huh…”) or blames the kids, their cultural decadence (really, students today are more “decadent” than they were in the 1960s? Not sure of that…) or, more deviously, maps one’s own political perversity on to the student body today (me as a kid = students in the 1960s / me as a grownup who writes for TNR = students circa now).
I think all of these answers are lazy and/or constructed in bad faith – some worse than others. What do I think is the issue? Personally, I think it’s the pressures (both real and perceived, fantasized) of the labor market. The perceived diligence and persistence that it takes to stay ahead of the “acceptable life” curve (which of course varies depending on the university we’re talking about – what is an acceptable end for many of my students would represent a catastrophic collapse to most Harvard students). Constant self-monitoring, constant presentation-of-self or anticipation thereof on the market of work and life and status, a grating sense that only the visible people matter is the name of the game. In particular, those students who might be the most likely candidates to participate in or even lead a protest movement – those in the humanities and social sciences – are haunted by a sense that everything worth doing is becoming increasingly impossible to do (collapse of the art market, collapse of the market for creative writing, rationalizing constriction of academia, etc etc) and thus in order to escape the soft hellishness of the cubicle, they need to keep their eyes on the prize.
This is an extremely worried generation of college students. Do you know how many nervous collapses (with hospitalization) happen in my undergraduate classes a semester? I’m teaching a single class of 45 undergrads this semester, and I’ve had 3 psychiatric hospitializations. I think, for reasons both real and not, students today are too stressed and anxious about their futures to worry about anything at all other than their school work, their internships, and the improbability that they will get to live the life that they would like to live.
The club tables that Kazin sees on the quad are an echo of the clubs they joined or led in high school. The spirit of protest has been pressured into the form of CV fodder; there is no time or energy for revolt save as an “after-school activity,” a hobby.
How do I know? Because the same logic structures my own life and work. Obviously, obviously. I am terrified of losing what I have, or not getting what I ultimately want while simultaneously being incredibly disheartened at the absurdity and issuelessness of what it is that I do. Pseudonymous blogging is my after-school activity; it has likely the same use-value as plastering anti-war posters on the designated placarding walls on campus.
badiou: reactionary modernist
(xposted to Long Sunday….)
We don’t do enough Radical Philosophy around here, I suppose because there’s not enough on-line for us to link to. But it really is – along with NLR and n+1 – one of the few things I’m genuinely excited to see drop through the slot in the front door.
In the new one, a particularly lucid piece by Peter Osborne on Badiou. Here are the first paragraphs, all that’s publicly available on-line:
Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
Peter OsborneIf anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring 2006, brought to eleven the number of his books published in English in eight years – a period following swiftly on, not entirely contingently, from the deaths of Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard (1995–1998), and coinciding with that of Derrida (2004).* However, it is not simply the number of translations that is remarkable (‘remarkable, but not surprising’, as Wittgenstein would say), but the fact that a philosophy such as this – for all its idiosyncratic philosophical charms – could so readily have assumed the role of ‘French philosophy of the day’ within the transnational market for theory.
Badiou’s philosophy takes a forbiddingly systematic form; it is anti-historical, technically mathematical and broadly Maoist in political persuasion. It has no interest in (in fact, denies the philosophical relevance of) ‘meaning’, and appears impervious to feminism. It takes a roguish self-satisfaction in its heterosexism.
Stylized individuality is a condition of branding, and ‘difficulty’ is a prerequisite of entry into this particular field, but there are more than market factors at work in Badiou’s successful transition to international theorist. It is a gauge of a number of things: the desire still invested in the English-language reception of French philosophy; the theoretical heresies that a new generation of the so-called ‘old’ Left will overlook in exchange for political solidarity (Žižek, master of this field, is Badiou’s mentor here); the strategic brilliance of two interventions – against Deleuze (The Clamour of Being, 1997; trans. 2000) and against the ‘delirium’ of ethics (Ethics, 1994; trans. 2001);1 the inherent brilliance of Being and Event, for all its ultimate philosophical madness; and last, but by no means least, the rhetorical power of ‘the (re)turn of philosophy itself’ – title of an essay of Badiou’s from 1992.2 It is in the profoundly contradictory character of the return of philosophy in Badiou – at once avant-garde and breathtakingly traditional – that the historical meaning of his thought is to be found.3 To anticipate my conclusion: Being and Event is a work – perhaps the great work – of philosophical neo-classicism. As such, at the level of philosophical form, it surpasses its ambivalent predecessor, Heidegger’s Being and Time, in the rigour of its reactionary modernism. The modernity of Badiou’s mathematics does not mitigate, but rather reinforces, the authoritarianism of his philosophical axiomatics and the mysticism of his conception of the event.
It really is a shame that we can’t read this together on here. There’s even a convincing bit on our perennial favorite, the history of big T little t theory, that I’m sure would produce a lovely comment thread. (The wonderful thing is, Osborne is able to 1) treat the subject “theory” while 2) never losing sight of the particulars, especially, the historical particulars of its rise and fall…)
If every one of you out there would just subscribe, we could talk a bit more about the piece. What are you waiting for?
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