Two links

I'd like to say more about both of these at some point, but...

The Contemporary Condition

and:

the entire run of Cahiers pour l'Analyse, the locus classicus of '60s poststructuralism, is now on-line.

Libertarian or Maoist?

A new quiz show! Everyone can play! Can you correctly match the ideology to the statement? (No cheating! Follow the links only after guessing!)

1.

Promoting equality of the sexes...

by excluding women from citizenship. Notice that her husband, who presumably shares her religious views, is already a citizen.

2. (via this wonderfully fun book)

Grandiose causes need new-style arguments. For example: hijab must be banned; it is a sign of male power (the father or eldest brother) over young girls or women. So, we'll banish the women who obstinately wear it. Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. [...]

Or, contrariwise: it is they who freely want to wear that damned headscarf, those rebels, those brats! Hence, they shall be punished. Wait a minute: do you mean it isn't the symbol of male oppression, after all? The father and eldest brother have nothing to do with it? Where then does the need to ban the scarf come from? The problem in hijab is conspicuously religious. Those brats have made their belief conspicuous. You there! Go stand in the corner!

Either it's the father and eldest brother, and "feministly" the hijab must be torn off, or it's the girl herself standing by her belief, and "laically" it must be torn off. There is no good headscarf. Bareheaded! Everywhere! As it used to be said-even non-Muslims said it-everyone must go out "bareheaded."

How'd you do?

Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

Most of these are pretty easy if you've been around the block ... but the resemblance is uncanny.

Mad Skillz

A recent list-serve post:

I am trying to help a recent recipient of a BA in philosophy get a job as a research associate in a USA policy think-tank. He needs to explain how the study of philosophy has granted him strong research, proofreading, and editing skills. Perhaps someone could suggest materials available online dealing with this?

Apparently this philosophy student learned to outsource all of his research to others who, in turn, outsource all of their research to others. I would assume that a basic operation for research associates at policy think tanks would be to use such arcane resources as libraries and "the Google" to, y'know, find shit out.

Going Galt, the Aftermath

Via a commenter over at Obsidian Wings, we get this very helpful sequel to Atlas Shrugged:

(Bob the Angry Flower archives here)

Misadventures in Advertising

This has been bugging me for weeks. There is an ad for a suicide prevention hotline up on bus stops all over the city. It is a headstone engraved with the following text:

FRANCOIS
1957-1.866.555.1212

The implication, obviously, is that poor Francois lived from 1957 until he called the suicide hotline. No one at Suicide Action Montreal saw that? Might I suggest that SAM adopt the following slogan:

Want to kill yourself? Call us. We can help.

Something Borrowed and Something Annoying

I don't like Andrew Sullivan much, as a writer, as a thinker, as a political commentator. Never have. Whatever. But I still like visiting his blog because he links to some really cool stuff sometimes. To wit. YouTube videos remixed into songs for Kutiman's new album, Thru You. Totally fun.

But then Sullivan writes this about the project: "The wisdom of crowds just got musical and online."

Uh, no.

Unless Kutiman is actually just the nom de tune (heehee, get it?) of the anonymous masses who appear in the videos, and who spontaneously generate these songs from the seemingly ramdom confluences of their separate projects, then, no, this has nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds. It's the wisdom of one guy. Who has a lot of talent, and even more patience. The bottom falling out of the stock market--that's the wisdom of crowds! Rousseau's ideal legislature--that's the wisdom of crowds! Sampling? Not so much.

Another Brush With Infamy

Ashley Todd's encounter with the dark phantom menace in her own mind was supposed to have occurred at my old ATM in Pittsburgh. Why, I was just there last Friday closing an old account. The Citizens Bank stands at the corner of Pearl and Liberty, in the heart of Bloomfield, Pittsburgh's Little Italy. just across Pearl Street is my favorite Thai restaurant in the 'burgh, the not so imaginatively named Thai Cuisine. Yummy curries. Cross Liberty on Pearl, go four blocks, and the powder blue house on the left (the one with the yellow door) is where I lived a few years back.

Anyway, anyone with even a passing knowledge of that ATM and that neighborhood must have known right away that Ms. Todd's strange encounter with a militant, knife-wielding Obama supporter was almost certain fiction (not to mention bad fiction). At 9 pm on a Wednesday night in mid-October, she's supposed to be attacked by a large black man wearing only a black undershirt, on a busy street, in front of a bank that literaly bristles with security cameras (check out Google streetview if you don't believe me). Uh-huh.

Accelerating Contradictions: When and How

This post over at MyDD seems a bit wrong-headed to me. Obama, speaking in Nevada, said:

Because of the housing crisis, we are now in a very dangerous situation where financial institutions across this country are afraid to lend money. If all that meant was the failure of a few big banks on Wall Street, it would be one thing. But that's not what it means. What it means is that if we do not act, it will be harder for you to get a mortgage for your home or the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. What it means is that businesses won't be able to get the loans they need to open new factories, or hire more workers, or make payroll for the workers they have. What it means is that thousands of businesses could close. Millions of jobs could be lost. A long and painful recession could follow.

To which Jerome Armstrong responds:

But I thought the reason why this happened was because credit was too easy to get for those who could not afford it? But... nevermind.

Which in no way contradicts anything Obama said. The causes of the trouble and the effects of the trouble don't have to be identical. This is how crises work: overproduction leads to a glut leads to a decapitalization leads to underproduction. It's called a business cycle. Same principle applies here.

Armstrong's point in all this is:

Yea, I am mocking of Obama. The underlying attitude I have is: why he is abandoning his self-proclaimed skepticism of Bush here, why? Can anyone say with a straight face that his argument for why Democrats should go along with Bush and back this bill that he's presented is sound? I don't even see an argument. All that he's offered is a bit of fear mixed in with post-partisan and some language changes to go along with a few platitudes.

Presumably, Armstrong would rather see the sort of thing Digby (via a reader and Rick Perlstein) is calling "a progressive Shock Doctrine." That is, letting the crisis deepen to the point where people will welcome a new New Deal. Back in the olden days, this was called accelerating the contradictions (although this phrase has a more activist sense than the rather passive formulation given by Digby, doing things to make the crisis worse instead of simply waiting for it to deepen on its own).

All well and good. But does Armstrong really beleive that a Democratic presidential candidate is not only going to embrace such a strategy but going to declare in a public address that he is embracing such a strategy? Really?

Obama's statement seems to sit right in the middle of the concerned prognostications given by a pretty wide range of commentators. That's not an argument for the Paulson plan. But I don't take Obama to have been offering an argumant for the Paulson plan. In fact, he seems to be playing his cards pretty close to his chest when it comes to specific proposals. That's probably smart. If Obama's a Marxist, it's best to remain a crypto-Marxist for now.

The Salesmanship of Fear

Impending fatherhood has rendered me emotionally sensitive to a host of new triggers. Babies, mostly. And pregnant women. And the birthing of babies by pregnant women. All of these things are, without warning, liable to shatter my steely shell and leave me a blubbery trembling mess. This can be dangerous for myself and others if I happen to be driving down the highway at 7o mph.

Therefore, I would kindly ask GM to deep-six their current radio campaign for On-Star.

The ad portrays an On-Star operator responding to a car crash involving a pregnant woman. The ad opens with the operator talking to the woman immediately after the crash. The woman is alright, but she is worried because she is pregnant. The operator contacts 911, and then connects the woman with her husband, and the add closes with his panicked concern for her and her tearful assurances that she's alright.

I had to scream at the radio--transmute all my fear and sadness and relief into anger--in order to keep some semblance of my wits about me.

Look, I know that advertising always plays on the passions. And usually the sad passions, at that. Getting people to feel a need for your product frequently involves activating anxieties and then offering the product as a balm for those anxieties. (Even thought this appeal to fear and anxiety is usually, and most effectively, subtle and mediated; the insurance commercial that directly says "You will die and then your family will be poor and helpless" is the exception, and recognized as such.) But this experience brought this home in a particularly forceful way. Rather than enabling us to confront our hopes and fears and live with them, advertising encourages our fear by offering up a savior. You should be afraid of losing your spouse or child in a car crash. You should buy a GM car with On-Star to allay that fear. The fear doesn't actually go anywhere when it is allayed in this way. Rather, it is preserved as a dark background behind your new attachment to your GM car. Should something happen now, should the On-Star fail to save your loved ones, you are left completely unprepared. This isn't what was supposed to happen.

Aristotle distinguishes optimism and courage. Optimism is the expectation that you will prevail, that things will turn out as you hope. Courage, on the other hand, is the ability to act beyond any hope of things turning out well. I know that I am congenitally prone to optimism, but, as the birth of my child nears, I am more and more aware that optimism is not what is called for. It is grossly insufficient to the moment. I'm no less ruled by fear just because I always tell myself everything will turn out alright.

But this just points up the falseness of any attempt to bring about "freedom from fear" by means of such optimism. Hope and optimism do not free you from fear. They silently preserve its dominion.

Home Again

Were I've been:

What's to Love?

People on the nets seem to like this Peter Beinart essay on American patriotism. Not sure why, exactly, except that it has that middle-of-the-road quality that makes everyone feel like they got their props. "Liberals think patriotism is x, and conservatives think it is y, but isn't it really a bit of x and a bit of y?" This is the bad dialectics that believes it has mediated two concepts when it has imagined itself to have kept what is good about each and discarded what is bad.

Anyway, the essay ends with this bon mot:

So is wearing the flag pin good or bad? It is both; it all depends on where and why. If you're going to a Young Americans for Freedom meeting, where people think patriotism means "my country right or wrong," leave it at home and tell them about Frederick Douglass, who wouldn't celebrate the Fourth of July while his fellow Americans were in bondage. And if you're going to a meeting of the cultural-studies department at Left-Wing U., where patriotism often means "my country wrong and wronger," slap it on, and tell them about Mike Christian, who lay half-dead in a North Vietnamese jail, stitching an American flag.

What immediately jumps out at me is that when Beinart needs an case of pathological right-wing patriotism, he can appeal to an actual organization, but when he needs a balancing case on the left, he goes straight into the ether of Platonic forms. No actual institution is needed, for he can appeal to that august "Left-Wing U."

This seems to me to be a symptom of the underlying schema by which patriotism is usually discussed. Conservativism is rooted in the actual institutions and traditions of the nation, and therefore loves the past of the country. Liberalism aspires to the regulative ideals of the nation, and therefore loves the future. Its the contest between Right and Left Hegelians, between those who emphasize the constitutive reality of the idea and those who emphasize its critical, regulative reality. The right loves what is, the left loves what ought to be.

But the world just doesn't divide up that way.

Liberals love the past just as much as conservatives, they just love a different past--the past of labor organizing, abolitionist struggles, civil rights movements, etc. Liberals love the liberal past, which seems to them to be embodied more in struggles and movements than in official institutions. Conservatives love the conservative past, which tends to be the officially recognized and sanctioned institutions of the military-industrial complex and the nuclear family.

And the pasts loved by both liberals and conservatives are not actual, but imaginary. They are at least as regulative and ideal as they are constitutive. Beinart claims at one point: "To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours." But this never happens. We may say this from time to time, when we are unable to give an account of why we love something, but our inability to give voice to something ought not be mistaken for a positive sign of that something's non-existence. On this question, I am convinced by Plato and Aristotle: we recognize something as ours only because we think it good. The bad parts get excised.

For patriotic folks, conservative and liberal alike, the parts of America they don't like don't count. The bad parts are the inessential, the accidental dross, the mere appearance that is overcome by the inner reality. The disagreement is not about America's past versus its future, or the real versus the ideal America, but about what is good and lovable.

UPDATE:

Atrios: "Amazingly, on every single issue there is, both political parties get it wrong but Peter Beinart gets it just right."

Exactly.

Obama's Principle Contradiction

I have come to think that the organizing contradiction of the Obama campaign is that between competence and changing the rules. On the one hand, Obama appeals to many Democratic partisans (it seems to me) because he is both a competent politician (unlike Gore or Kerry) and promises competent governance (unlike Bush). On the other hand, he appeals to activists and independents, it seems, because he speaks and looks and acts differently from anyone else in politics, and because he promises to radically change how politics works in America (and his campaign has already fulfilled this promise to some extent). In other words, Obama has to play the game better than anyone else AND change the rules, change the game.

This is not meant to be a criticism, or even a diagnosis of a problem with Obama's campaign. As Lenin said, "Antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same." Obama can be both a player and a revolutionary. In fact, he has to be both. He slips up only when he is neither (as with the current FISA and telecom immunity shenanigans). So long as Obama is anything other than lame, he'll win.

An Argument for Sex and the City

I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist...

Anthony Lane

Scene from a Morning Conversation

A: The closet is a terrible thing, and no one should have to live in the closet, but without the closet, Freddie Mercury never would have written "Fat Bottomed Girls."

B: Indeed.

A: How did anyone ever think Freddie Mercury was anything other than gay?

B: It was the Seventies. Everyone looked gay. And everyone was queer: Mick Jaggar, David Bowie. Even straight guys like Rod Stewart looked gay. Rod. Heheh.

A: Rod Stewart is way too gay to be anything but straight.

It's Scientifically Proven

You will hate this song.

I think the Komar and Melamid shtick is pretty interesting. That's all.

True That.

Why Superman will always [sc., given lazy writers who don't know how to make use of such inherently interesting material] suck.

Carrie Brownstein's Got a Blog!

I had no idea!

S-K was and remains one of the formative experiences of my post-collegiate youth. Their albums and concerts chart my coming of age. They are, in my opinion, the greatest self-referential band of all time. What I mean is that many of their best songs are precisely about the passionate experience of their music (and of music in general). They sang about themselves, not in a narcissistic way, but in such a way that their songs were like worlds unto themselves, perfect articulations of the experience of listening,

“My life has been flushed down the drain”

So says one Bears Stearns executive. (via Eschaton)

To which I say: what a sad life. I recognize that losing millions of dollars must really suck. After all:

There was talk Monday that with their life savings nearly depleted, some executives had moved quickly, putting their weekend homes on the market.

Nonetheless, any life that can be flushed down the drain by the loss of any quantity of money is a sad life.

Brain Dead

No, not me.

David Mamet has a piece in the Village Voice detailing his transformation from a self-described liberal to a self-described conservative. I take this as definitive proof of the limits of introspection.

He claims his conversion is an outcome of thinking about politics in the context of his new play, November. A plot synopsis, supplied by Mamet himself:

The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

Great! Oleanna in the Oval Office.

Mamet has been always a reactionary, and will be always a reactionary. I only wish his confession would have taken the form of his imagined perfect theatrical review:

"I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead."