"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."*

Scott McLemee links to the first two installments of his Zizek Watch column for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, a passage from the second column:

And so in February, when BBC Radio broadcast a program called "The Art of Laziness," Mr. Zizek appeared on it as a uniquely qualified expert. He criticized programs that teach relaxation techniques. "If you look closely at their leaflets," he said, "they tell you first that we are hyperactive and should learn to withdraw. But next, the second paragraph, they always say: 'This way you will relax and be even more productive.'"

(This reminds me a bit of the advice so often doled out by women's mags: women should be self-sufficient, since that's what attracts men. Anyway, continuing:)

Alluding to the surrealist thinker Georges Bataille, Mr. Zizek denounced "the hidden economy of 'I am lazy a little bit so that I will work better.'" Instead, he offered the example of residents of Montenegro, an earthquake-prone area of the former Yugoslavia. The local ethnic stereotype is that inhabitants of the region are utterly shiftless.

"The zero-level standard joke about laziness is how a Montenegro guy masturbates," he said. "He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in, and waits for the earthquake." The pleasure that Montenegrins take in telling the joke seems to Mr. Zizek to be the correct attitude toward both laziness and political incorrectness.

*Edgar Bergen, via Charlie McCarthy

beyond college boyfriends

Splinters links to Jonathan Rée's "excellent radio series" Journeys in Thought with Nietzsche, which I plan to listen to soon.
My fondness for N. comes and goes. At thirteen, I bought Beyond Good & Evil and loved it, but the love had less to do with its ideas than the pride I felt in reading it and being seen reading it; even if my classmates had never heard of Nietzsche, I thought the book cover by itself conveyed a stoic intellectualism. (Nowadays, unfortunately, it would probably be mistaken by 9th graders for this.) But then, during my senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I made the common mistake of dating a prospective philosophy major, one of those deeply maladjusted and unhygienic boys who invariably decides, somewhere between the ages of 18 to 20, that Nietzsche is a kindred spirit, and mistakes each conversation for another opportunity to give a long-winded misreading of N. Later in college, single and free to love N. without inciting post-coital speeches on the superman, I signed up for a seminar in continental philosophy and bought most of N.'s books. But halfway into the semester, I got a raging case of mono and had to drop my classes, and ever since have associated the uncracked spines of N.'s books with sickness and failure. And, in general, when it comes to books, I try to avoid a recognition of my avoidance of them by continuing to avoid them.

Earlier this month, though, I reread parts of Tony Davies' Humanism while composing a blog post, and came across several great passages by or about N. Among them, this, which makes me very excited to listen to Jonathan Rée's broadcast:

Unlike other philosophers, before and since, [Nietzsche] offers his ideas not as truth-statements but as poetic fictions, parables, images, which he makes no attempt to separate from his own mood, temperament and personal circumstances. Indeed, he argued that all statements must be read as metaphors of a particular disposition -- physical, psychological, or digestive (he himself was a vegetarian). … The only grounds that remain for distinguishing between statements are the strength, authenticity, and beauty with which they are uttered: their 'will to power.'

damn, now something else to think about

Danger Blog! posts an excerpt from a profile of Stephen Fry:

One of Fry's heroes is acting legend James Cagney.

"When he was in his late 80s he was learning a seventh language, he was reading Russian and French literature, sailing his yacht, building things. It was this amazing list.

"Cagney was asked how he could retain such an interest in life. His answer was, 'I guess it's because I never give a second's thought to myself.'

"That's a wonderful lesson and really so un-American. Most Americans think the key to happiness is thinking about yourself."

I didn't realize interiority was a specifically American phenomenon. Or that temperment is a willed philosophy.

de botton's status anxiety

Yesterday, I read at Maud's that Alain de Botton's newest book, Status Anxiety will appear in the U.K. next month and in the U.S. in May. A three part documentary, based on the book, will be broadcast starting Saturday March 6th on Channel 4 in the UK, and in Australia on the ABC starting Sunday, June 20th. Three clips are available online. Judging from them, the documentary is a fair multimedia translation of de Botton's work: the author v.o.'s summaries of major philosophers' work over kitschy visuals and Muzak.
I have an awkward relationship with de Botton's work. On one hand, I relate to his project of using fiction to write essays, of privileging ideas over plot and character; in this sense, de Botton has been a role model or -- here, admitting my vanity -- a competitor with the advantage of being born before me. From an old identity theory interview:

RB: I read Kiss & Tell. That was essayistic?

AB: Well, yes. I think so. Really, it was a reflection on different ideas. The point was not the plot so much as the ideas in it.

RB: Well, it more closely resembles fiction than what you have gone on to write since then.

AB: Exactly. Nevertheless, it wasn't totally straight fiction and I suppose I was just trying to move closer to what I felt was where my real interests lay. Which is in a non-fiction structure but which can allow for a certain amount of personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel.

On the other hand, my love for his work is purely theoretical. The experience of reading it is painful. His ideas, in my opinion, hit their marks but bounce off them, too flimsy to penetrate. In examining everyday life in simple language, the risk is that precision will give way to banality, and the reward is that the subject matter will unearth observations that are both unusual, new and fresh, and honest, familiar, true. De Botton is as banal as he is earnest, and as earnest as he is superficial, overly content that his structure and his aims are more important than his writing and ideas.
In his interview with Birnbaum, de Botton responds to American critics' accusation that his books "dumb down" philosophy:

RB: I wonder if the reason Consolations of Philosophy was critically rejected here was because the homegrown philosophy of the USA is pragmatism, which eschews 19th century models of philosophical systems?

AB: With all due respect, I don't think that's at all the reason. The real reason is that it was felt by highbrow critics to be uncomfortably close to the dumb side of America. So that there is this terrific fear on the highbrow coterie, "Where is that line between the good guys and Hollywood, the bad guys, Disney etc.?" I think with the Proust book they felt, "Here's a guy, he is actually flirting with the idea he is lowbrow, but actually he's clearly high brow. P-r-o-s-t, P-r-u-s-t, we don't know how the word is pronounced, but clearly this must be highbrow even though he's playing around." So they went along with the joke. And suddenly I come along with The Consolations of Philosophy, which was written in a very similar way, but somehow people felt, "Well, actually he's gone too far." So this is like Who Moved My Cheese, Tuesdays with Morrie, or whatever that guy is.

RB: Philosophy for Dummies?

AB: Exactly. So there was that charge. It surprised me as a European. Here I am being accused of dumbing down America. This was on the part of Americans who presumably had their philosophical training in that rather austere analytic school of philosophy. Emerson's view of philosophy has disappeared from the American campus. You could not now take an Emersonian view of philosophy. That was a kind of irony because the guiding figure behind The Consolations of Philosophy is, in a way, Emerson. But Emerson has disappeared off the curriculum. His style and the idea of a democratic language with which to address ordinary issues has disappeared. In the reception to my book one can make a mini history of American intellectual attitudes.

Though I'm better read in continental philosophy than I am in analytical, I find it interesting to think that something in American culture is inimical to de Botton's style. My guess: because we do have Philosophy for Dummies and Hegel in 60 Minutes (that one's sitting on my bookshelf), we might not have the same need as other cultures for more popularized philosophy. And, given that Philosophies for Dummies wins no acclaim, and garners no major reviews, we're not sure why books like The Consolations of Philosophy should. But I'm open to other theories. Anyone out there a die-hard de Botton fan?

Biting Hume

The Guardian on 'Kant's wild years': "But according to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes." Further details affirm that Kant did, in fact, attend parties as a clown, that wild motherfucka.

kant, you cunt. if i'm wrong, you can't be right.

Via the never aging Caterina, I found the ethical philosophy selector. My top 5 matches (percentages are curved):

1. Kant   (100%)  
2. John Stuart Mill   (94%) 
3. Jean-Paul Sartre   (89%)  
4. Jeremy Bentham   (69%) 
5. Aquinas   (60%)  

Kant and others are described here, and the descriptions remind me why I don't take ethical advice from online quiz results.

Q: What is this image?

A: A diagram of Kant's work that appears in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?.

theory quizzes

This site was originally designed for a class at Purdue University, but any internet straggler can take its quizzes. You can test yourself in Narratology, Psychology, or Postmodernism, and can use the answer key as a short theory refresher or introduction.

top 10(?)

Last week, I mentioned Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, which argues that "the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline."
David Frum responds, "Murray underscores this assertion by challenging his readers and listeners to name even one artistic or scientific achievement … of the past 50 years that will still matter to people in the year 2200." Here's Frum's list, "in no particular order, of 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:"

1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
2. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao.
3. The paintings of Jackson Pollock.
4. The Godfather I & II
5. C. Milosz, The Captive Mind.
6. West Side Story.
7. M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
8. The collected “I Love Lucy.”
9. VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
10. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA.

Campbell's soup can still make money, right?

From the BBC: "The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that only artworks the artist was directly involved in producing can be considered a Warhol original, according to reports in the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph in the UK."

Baudrillard on Warhol: "Modern art had already gone a very long way in the deconstruction of its object, but it was Warhol who went furthest in the deconstruction of the subject of art, in the destruction of the artist. It was he who went furthest in the disinvestment of the creative act. One could say that this is his snobbery, but a snobbery that relieves us of all the affectation of art -- precisely because he is machinic."

Later in Baudrillard's The Plastic Inevitable: "Behind this machinic snobbery, what actually is happening is a rise in power, a potentialization of the object, image, sign and simulacrum. A rise in power of value, for which the finest example is the art market itself. In this market sphere we are far from the alienation of the price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the fetishism of value, which explodes the very notion of the market and in the same blow destroys the work of art as such. He works towards the extermination of the real by the image, by such an overbidding of the image that it puts an end to all aesthetic value. In this sense it is impossible to say, like H. Obalk, that Warhol is not a great artist. Fortunately, he's not an artist at all. Quite the contrary: at stake in his work is an anthropological challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics."

Later in the BBC piece: "The collectors believe the board are deliberately refusing to verify the works in an attempt to keep prices high, reports the Telegraph."

And from Andy Warhol: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

And a bit of trivia: After Warhol died of heart failure in 1987, Sotheby's auctioned a Warhol android prototype that Warhol was developing to appear in his place on TV talk shows.

quantifying achievement

Published on Oct. 21 by HarperCollins and accompanied by a publicity release optimistically anointing it "his most ambitious and controversial work yet," "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950" is well timed to stir debate. At a moment of considerable East-West tension, when the phrase "clash of civilizations" has rarely had greater currency, Mr. Murray has issued what he says is a mathematically precise global assessment of human achievement, a "résumé" of the species in which Europeans like Shakespeare, Beethoven and Einstein predominate and in which Christianity stands out as a crucial spur to excellence. Equally provocative, he maintains that the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline. [More>]

I wonder if there's some kind of tautology at work here: achievement is measured from the perspective of countries that have been most influenced by the West, and so the West is shown to have had the most achievements. Can achievement be distinguished from influence, and can influence exclude political, economic and historic circumstances? I haven't read the book; maybe it has interesting answers to these questions.

Palestinian Scholar Edward Said Dies in New York

Yahoo! News
BBC News
New York Times

sofia coppola's "good taste"

Often, magazine profile writers claim that, unlike other profiles of a celebrity, their profile has found the key to unlocking that celebrity's life. That key is always a generic abstract principle-- courage, hard work, family trauma, etc. In the case of the NY Times Magazine profile of Sofia Coppola, the abstract principle is "good taste," which the profile conceptualizes as effortless but trained, individualistic but group-oriented, and timeless but timely.
Here, some clips from the profile (left) and some commentary on the idea of taste, drawn from an old college paper of mine and a random website (right):

She has inherited many of [her father’s] talents -- his taste, his ability to surround himself with talented friends, his ambition and entrepreneurship. [Marc Jacobs on Sofia:] “She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural.”	In 18th century England, as the Early Modern yielded completely to the Modern, “taste” emerged as the new and dominant form of capital. And while taste foregrounds subjectivity to the detriment of traditional symbols of class standing, it has also become a manifestation of class standing that "naturalizes" class.
This day, and most days, she had carefully chosen all aspects of her life, detail by detail, in what appeared to be an effortless manner.	"Because it is misperceived as spontaneous and disinterested, taste functions as an effective instrument of class domination and reproduction. The definition of "good taste" is part of [the struggle] for the monopolization of symbolic violence, which arbitrarily imposes as natural and legitimate the evaluative standards and perceptual categories of the dominant class.
[Zoe Cassavetes on Sofia:] “I said, 'Do you want to have dinner?' She said, 'O.K., do you want to go to Jean Lafitte?' -- which was a bistro on 58th Street, where I went all the time. When she said Jean Lafitte, we had an instant bond. We spoke the same language.'' ''My first impression of Sofia,'' Jonze recalled recently, ''was that she was quiet and graceful. And that she had taste, and when I say taste, I mean judgment in really subtle things. She always knew the feeling she wanted to convey in everything she did. And that's true taste.''	"Mastering the complex and subtle nuances of good taste requires a long process of familiarization. Since this process is carried out primarily within the family and in elite schools, good taste only comes "naturally" to upper class children who have long been exposed to it. In everyday interaction, displays of a taste for "difficult" objects signal membership in the privileged class while a taste for common, vulgar, or less refined ones betrays membership in the dominated class." [more>]

propps to the storyteller

Robert McCrum, musing over film and literature’s return to the classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, asks,

How many stories are there to tell in the world? One school of thought holds that there are just 10 archetypal tales around which novelists spin more or less elegant variations. I remember being persuaded, years ago, that there were as few as seven basic plots at the heart of our literature, or was it three?

Or, my own question: What if we only recognize a narrative as a story if we've heard it called a story? Or: What if our definition of "story,” more prescriptive than descriptive, limits the number of stories that can be told? (But also, in defining something abstract, such as art or literature, aren't we always prescribing its qualities?)

the weakest link

From Eclogues: "…you have to love an indie band which rhymes 'Derrida' and 'Antarctica', as Winnipeg's The Weakerthans do in 'Our Retired Explorer'. (' Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida/But I must get back to my dear Antarctica .') The video for this song features a guy dressed up as Foucault…"

La Differance

Churches are hospitals for sinners, rather than hotels for saints.

BHL

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French Algerian Jew, studied under Althusser and "became the most famous member of a group called the nouveaux philosophes who turned against Marxism."

He is rarely referred to by his full name, and is known instead as a brand: BHL. He is like an unfathomably French combination of Melvyn Bragg, J.K. Rowling and David Beckham. If Bernard-Henri Lévy didn't exist, you couldn't possibly invent him. [more>]

the cultural u-turn

Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research

* A history of the senses has emerged, demonstrating how changes in values and assumptions have reshaped the nature of the sense of smell while, at the same time, diminishing its role in the sensory arsenal. Modern Westerners are now viscerally disgusted by odors people used to accept, because of changing ideas about cleanliness and the body.
* Various approaches to the history of emotion have shown how basic formulations have altered, with significant implications for the ways that emotions are handled by society and experienced individually. Indulgence in grief in 19th-century America turned, by the 1920s, into aversion, so much so that deep feeling denoted a need for therapy.
* Many diseases, as well, have at least partially been explained through cultural construction. The fascinating work on the emergence of modern anorexia nervosa has shown how changing beliefs about mother-daughter bonds promoted new forms of unconscious rebellion around food as a cherished family symbol, with new standards of beauty supplementing those reactions.
Such achievements, of the cultural turn at its best, clearly indicate that we should not reverse directions too fully, even as faddish interest declines. Initial sketches, as in the history of the senses, are still being elaborated, and there is much more to be learned. But limitations in the impact of the cultural turn also provide food for thought as we consider what should come next.

we eat what we are

Sometime in the history of advertisement, a think tank decided that we like eating anthropomorphized food. Instead of gaining our empathy, smiling food with human eyes would make us hungry; instead of making eating feel like murder, eating would be playful interaction with a willing cast of characters.

The candy aisle in convenience stores looks like a class portrait, rows of grinning faces; the think tank must have been right, or else anthropomorphic food wouldn’t still be so popular. But projecting human qualities on our pets saves them from being carved up for dinner, and—for me—singing and dancing food either elicits empathy, or repulsion for the food that would sell out its brothers and sisters.

Since the logic of advertisements is most obvious when it fails, I’ve always felt I’m in a good position to understand the logic of anthropomorphized food. But the logic seems over-determined, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with one coherent theory. Here are my ideas, most of them based on conversations with my boyfriend:

1. By anthropomorphizing food, we’re ascribing food will power. Food wants to be eaten, as much as, or more than, we want to eat it. So, anthropomorphized food might be assuaging two different kinds of guilt—targeting our culture of obesity, and telling us to feel less guilty for over-eating, or addressing our unconscious guilt over eating animals by making us, on some level, believe all food is happily devoured.

2. By making food human, we ignore its production. Fruit with eyes and legs isn’t picked off the tree by migrant workers; instead, it jumps off the tree, into a cart, and hitchhikes to the nearest market. Anthropomorphic food is an obvious instance of what Marx called commodity fetishism, in which "the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer."

3. Or, the logic of consumption is best expressed by a much older logic—that of cannibalism. The Aborigines ate their enemies to incorporate their powers, and omophagia, one form of cannibalism, was practiced to preserve the life force of ancestors. Consumption is more appealing if it seems like acquisition rather than the erasing or disappearance of goods. (The cannibalism idea was much better articulated by my boyfriend.)

4. Maybe humanized food has to do with the pleasures of narrative. If the items on our plate are a cast of characters, we can turn eating into a story. Narrative psychologists say humans understand themselves by making stories -- that stories are central to thinking and feeling. If so, we’re apt to find stories, and hence characters, everywhere.

5. Children have a special need for stories, and cartoons cater to it by turning all kinds of objects and animals into characters. Anthropomorphic food, always cartoonish, offers us a pleasant opportunity for regression, for associating food with the comforts of Saturday-morning childhood.

6. Or, maybe, we’re all just repressed hunters. We give cats plastic mice, and advertisers give us talking food. Opening a bag of M & Ms is our substitute for tossing spears at antelopes.

***If you have thoughts or links to anthropomorphized food products, or know of any relevent advertisements or ad campaigns, please leave a comment. Here's a list of the campaigns and products I know of that star human-like food, but I know there's a lot more out there:

-Prego Pasta Bake Sauce
-Pizza Hut, Gary The Garlic
-Foster Farms Chickens
-M & Ms
-Runts
-Gobstoppers
-Frosted Mini-Wheats
-French's Mustard "funny food face"
-Frulatté
-Snapple
-Sour Patch Kids
-Kool-Aid
-California Raisins
-Pillsbury Doughboy
-Lemonheads
-McDonalds, Mayor McCheese and The McNuggets
-StarKist, Charlie the Tuna
-Slim Jims ("Eat Me!")
-Planters, Mr.Peanut
-those ads with the hot dog running for its life (name? brand?)
-older campaigns

art and madness

17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: "Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally'd."

Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces -- many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness -- is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.

Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it's being billed as the world's largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]

Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I'm one of those people. Here's why:

1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention-- but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.

related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.

written words are always letters

Get to the fourth paragraph.

getting emotional

The territorial imperative of modern specialists is a minor issue compared with the difficulty of grasping how the ancients understood emotion. The English word "anger" has connotations overlapping reasonably well with the Latin ira (as in "irate"). But things grow more complicated in classical Greek, which possesses an extremely rich vocabulary of anger, making firm distinctions among states we treat as similar.

No free-born Greek citizen would ever confuse cholos (experienced by women, children, the poor, and the sickly) with menis (the wrath of gods or heroes). The righteous indignation of nemesan had nothing in common with the experience of orge, a sort of full-body fury, impossible to conceal from others, in which violent retribution became an almost biological necessity.

The semantic differences imply social norms distinct from our own, and suggest, in turn, that angry feelings were experienced in a different way. [more>]

boredom's bliss

Curiously, boredom seems to be a modern ailment. The word didn't even exist in the English language until after 1750, says Patricia M. Spacks, author of "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind" (University of Chicago Press, 1995). "If people felt bored before the late 18th century, they didn't know it," she writes.

Once the concept had a name, it became universal. Philosophers ruminated over it. Teenagers whined about it. And psychologists churned out a blizzard of research.

"When we are bored," one scholar concluded, "our attitude toward time is altered, as it is in some dreamlike states. Time is endless, there is no distinction between past, present and future. There seems to be only an endless present."

One of the more unexpected findings is that the best cure for boredom might be ... more boredom.[more>]

INTJ

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.[more>]

Random thoughts on this article:
1) I rarely get lonely, and so call myself an introvert. But I think loneliness is the healthy impulse to spend time with people. The more time I spend with people, the less depressed I am; my inability to feel loneliness is faulty wiring.
2) When I was younger, I felt I lost my "authenticity" by spending too much time with people. What was important were my thoughts regarding myself; these thoughts were my stability, and by putting myself in social situations, I threatened this stability by spending too little time self-reflecting. (Self-reflection had to feel totalizing; too much action and my reflection couldn't contain it.)
3) People will hate me for saying this, but I think introversion may be an intellectual justification for (the, okay, yeah, normative idea of) social anxiety.

(a connecticut vacation for me)

Catharine's paper, "Monstrosity and Temporality: The Aesthetics of Futurity in
Kleist's Penthesilea," has been accepted by a Yale German grad. conference on Heroes and Villains. Die Glückwünsche (sp?).

daily quote

The seventh of the many philosophical systems of India recorded by Paul Deussen (Nachvedische Philosophie der Inder, 318) denies that the self can be an immediate object of knowledge, "because if our soul were knowable, a second soul would be required to know the first and a third to know the second." The Hindus have no historical sense (that is, they stubbornly prefer to examine ideas rather than the names and dates of philosophers); but we know that this radical negation of introspection is about eight centuries old. Schopenhauer rediscovers it around 1843. "The knower himself," he repents, "cannot be known precisely as such, otherwise he would be the known of another knower." —Borges, "Time and J.W.Dunne," Other Inquistions 1937-1952

Posted by nchicha at January 29, 2003, 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

a crotchety observation on superbowl sunday

Okay, sure, Britney's slutty and Christina's dirrrty. I don't really mind, except that their sexiness implies we're stupid.
What do I mean? Their images are blatantly sexy, but, at the same time, contain details that we're meant to respond to without registering, details that assume an invisible semiotics.
For example, take these two pics, one of Brit-Brit during her Super Bowl 2001 Pepsi commercial, and the other, Xtina, on her second album cover.

Brit-Brit wears red suspenders that emanate from her crotch, like a giant thong looped over her shoulders, or the head of an arrow pointing down. Xtina wears some kind of pubic hair mesh over the jeans' crotch, and a long string directs attention to — hey, that's where the penis enters! As explicit signs of availability, or sex appeal, these details are over-the-top funny. But they're not supposed to be funny; we're supposed to not notice them, say "Easy boy" and smile like Bob Dole.

meat market capitalism

I try to avoid television; for a lonely person, it's addictive. But I let myself watch High School Reunion b/c I can pretend it's a short course in American anthropology. Here's what I've learned.

One. The media combines and recombines archetypes. Two points on this: We already have emotional associations with each archetype, and so media acts on our emotions and engages us. And, nowhere in our culture, is the explicit emplyment of archetypes so acceptable as it is when portraying high schoolers. Look at the WB's website for High School Reunion: each reunion-goer gets a catchy label: "The Popular Girl," "The Artist," "The Bully," "The Nerd," "The Jock," "The Loner."

Two. In talking about our own high school experiences, we're encouraged to appeal to these archetypes and their familiar narratives. Shows like High School Reunion encourage transference: projecting ourselves and others from our high school experience onto other portrayals of the high school experience.

Three. We want want want to know, what is popularity? In American capatalism, the idea of popularity encompasses more than just the in-group: it encompasses market demand. So, how does popularity function?

Four. Let's take the case of two classmates on the show, Natasha and Holly.

Natasha	Holly
"The Popular Girl"	"The Shy Girl"

The guys on the show lust after Natasha and call her a beauty. Everyone ignores Holly, a playboy model and lawyer. Because attraction is social and competitive: the more people that like one girl, the more we're likely to like her. She's been deemed a suitable object of our desire. And obtaining her has social value.

Five. This brings me to my last point. We (the non-popular?) don't like believing popularity is so circular, that you're either in the loop (have people liking you, and getting more) or not (having none, getting none). High school stories are often revenge fantasies, in which new criteria is introduced for judging value. "The nerd," Ben R., is now handsome and rich, which is probably why he's been picked for the show. And Holly might have posed for Playboy as a way to overcome "The Shy Girl" label. We watch High School Reunion to see if outsiders can ever break into the loop, if they can assume new archetypes or redefine old ones (and if we can do the same).

um

"Darryl Macer, associate professor at the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, plans to create a human mental map -- a database that would contain a log of every human idea. "

L.A. WEEKLY: Why did you agree to be filmed for Derrida?

DERRIDA: I didn't immediately agree to it. I proceeded with deep reservations that had to do with the discomfort I've always felt about my image in photographs. I succeeded in publishing for almost 20 years without a single image of myself appearing in connection with my books, and there were two reasons for that. First, I had what you might describe as ideological objections to the conventional author photograph -- a head shot, a picture of the writer at his desk -- because it struck me as a concession to selling and to media. The second reason was that I've always had a difficult relationship with my own body and image. It's hard for me to look at myself in photographs, so for 20 years I gave myself permission to erase my image on political grounds.

euphoric states are up

The Conceptual Metaphor Homepage isolates and categorizes the metaphors we use in speech. You can search the site three ways: by metaphor name (Intelligence Is A Light Source; Light Is A Fluid), by source domain (the concept being referenced in the metaphor; for ex., body), or by target domain (i.e., "intelligence," in the metaphor "Intelligence Is A Light Source").

Never Play By the Rules

The Rules of Attraction
The teen dramedy is both the most clichéd and most inventive of the Hollywood genres. Both qualities, though, serve the same purpose: the clichés remove substance, and the inventiveness emphasizes style. Just look at the recent evolution of the teen flick--from Can't Hardly Wait to Get Over It to The Rules of Attraction (link goes to trailer). The style is, very often, the substance.

Every film has a style, but by style I mean something specific: blurred images, time-lapse photography, film run backwards, style with a capital S. Style makes the manipulation of images conspicuous.

Rules succeeds when it is Stylish, and fails when it tries to interest us in characters. Its characters just aren't interesting—except maybe for Lauren, who seems like a real person, but the wrong person for the role—and none of them are as believable as the film wants them to be. (Is it possible that every girl on campus looks like this:

?)

But the film's Style distracts us from the characters (it's interesting that Man With a Movie Camera gets a mention) and invests us in things like a leaf, an expression, a tub of blood. If we still need characters as an excuse for these good things, then I guess Rules is a forgiveable enterprise. Long live teens!

Need to get high.

I just watched the clip, linked to below, and it's incomprehensibly bad. No, comprehensibly and comprehensively bad. Yes.

Push Play

Derrida: The Man, The Movie

Watch a clip here.

More on Derrida:
—Derrida and Nonsense Theology, by Jay Michaelson. "…I will take up the challenge and provide a non- ontotheology that looks like nothing, that is not negative theology but rather a theology of nonsense and incommensurability."
—An Introduction to Poststructuralism and Derrida.
—A great on-line collection of Derrida excerpts, interviews, and articles.
—Sexy Pics 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
—the movie poster:

—And a Derrida quote:

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Derrida, like my father, is a French Sephardic Jew from Algeria. All the formative men in my life.

what a great phrase: "crackpot"

I'm full of crackpot theories, and I'm always hoping to come across respectable texts that confirm my theories. So, I'm putting out a request. If you know of any theoretical work that deals with these topics, please write me.
—memory as a supplement in the Derridean sense (in particular, I'm interested in traumatic memory: PTSD flashbacks)
—semiotic analyses of the occult/occult symbology
—depersonalization, dissociation, as possible experiences of being "other" to language (ha ha; indulge me)
--->later note: an experience of being "other," not being "outside" language.

American Idyll

from the NY Times—

"All of our victims have been innocent, have been defenseless, but now they're stepping over the line, because our children don't deserve this," declared Chief Charles Moose of the Montgomery County police, teary-eyed and angry after five days of fruitless searching for the sniper who has chosen victims seemingly at random and executed them from afar with single-shot accuracy.

The rhetoric of childhood has become increasingly unsettling. If children are "undeserving," the obvious implication is that adults are not undeserving. In America, adulthood operates in a post-Edenic space, and children are innocents before the fall. Adults may be "innocent" but they are also less innocent.

The article continues:

"We are angry and we are outraged," Mr. Duncan boomed at a news conference in describing "a new low" in the sniper's depredations.

An important thing is happening to our definition of innocence: Innocence is being conflated with potentiality. We have begun to measure innocence through potential; so when potential lessens, so does innocence.
Why would our culture choose this definition of innocence? My guess, probably lame and under-educated, is that weíve suppressed the impossibility of the American Dream by projecting the qualities we associate with the American Dream onto children.
This affects both our understanding of adulthood and childhood inóI would argueónegative ways.
We want children to be stable (passive) vessels of the qualities we project onto them. Since the qualities we best associate with the American Dream are ìpotentialityî or ìagency,î children become passive vessels of agency. The contradiction becomes clear when we flush out what potentiality actually is. To have potential is to not yet have made choices that would narrow that potential (potential as a kind of innocence). But, if we value children for their potential, we devalue the choices that allow for the existence of potential. The existence of choices is privileged over "making choices."
In a sense, we are devaluing agency when we value childhood, and, by valuing childhood in this way, we are constructing children as undifferentiated non-agents.

short history of what it means to be an Intellectual in America

I dedicate this morning to philosophy!
Kiss like Hegel / Make fun of Putnam / Make philosopher-light bulb jokes / Cook with Sartre / Call Nietzsche for tech support / Parody Husserl / Die like a philosopher / Be persecuted like a philosopher / Argue with Socrates / Read philosophy comix / Test your knowledge of philosophy / Generate Postmodernism

Thoughts on Depression.

Even supposing that society is more inhuman than in the past, when socialised medicine and unemployment benefits didn't yet exist, why would this give rise to depression rather than anxiety, fatigue, 'nervous breakdown' or just plain anger?

Alain Ehrenberg, a sociologist, attempts to answer this question in La Fatigue d'Ítre soi. Retracing in detail the history of depression since the 1950s (mainly in France), he shows very well how it ceased to be defined in terms of psychic pain, and came to be perceived more and more as a pathology of action. The new 'dÈprimÈ' lacks energy, is unable to 'perform', is inhibited in his work and his relationships with others. He suffers, the psychiatrists say, from 'psychomotor retardation'. And this new pathology emerges, as if by chance, in a society which values individual responsibility and initiative above all else. Just as Freudian neuroses were the pathology of a subject defined by prohibition and internal conflict, so contemporary depression is "the reverse of the sovereign individual, of the man who believes himself to be the author of his own life". In that sense, depression is not directly provoked or caused by contemporary society. Rather, Ehrenberg suggests, it is the negative 'counterpart' to the subjectivity created and so highly valued in this society. [more]

Break a leg, break a neck.

Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, now a play.

Cogito Ergo Sleep Naked.

A review of a new Descartes biography: "We learn that Descartes was only 5 foot 1 inch, wore a wig, slept in the nude, never married, and practiced vivisection on animals, which he considered soulless machines and therefore unworthy of sentiment."

Poor Argumentation 101. Should I take logic this summer?

hot as a poker

described by fark as a wicked philosophy game, but i haven't yet had a chance to play.

Crackpot: the category for my ramblings.

I've always thought that prudishness is not the absence of sexuality but rather an over sexualization. The prude interprets everything as sexual, and to hide her over-developed sexuality, resorts to prudishness.

If I seem upset by a boy taking off his shirt, it is because I am scared of being aroused in public. He will take it as an insult, while it is nothing so much as a perverted compliment.

Likewise, flinching when someone attempts a hug---that impulse to ascetism is a sign of great desire. We should be able to read each movement as its opposite, and the more we try to hide, the more we carelessly reveal.

Fun for all ages, as long as you're French.

The site that brought you theory cards now brings you. . . lego theorists.

Today's best

•The Exchange Program. "Beginning April 20th eight collaborators will switch places and props ó essentially, switch lives ó for ten days, and 'play' each other. We will each create instructions on how to 'be' or 'perform' themselves, turning personality into character, and foregrounding the performativity of daily life."
•How common is your surname?

Today's best

•Are you a MCM student with a B-average? Write your papers here.
•Was it the fat that really did them in? Inmates' last meals.
•A baby name generator, with categories like "Jewish (practicing)" and "Jewish (non-practicing)."

Law of the Mental Mirror Image

In the real world, as Popper knew perfectly well, the response of the scientist who has proposed that all swans are white when a black swan appears is not to say, cheerfully, "Wrong again!" It is to say, "You call that a swan?" But what really underlay the contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century's reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a lawóthe Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man (James Thurber) writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitiveólook at their living rooms!óand literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food.

-From The New Yorker

"It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearances."

Physiognomy, or face reading, is the "science" of assessing a man's personality via his facial features. Obviously, it's not clean pc fun, but I'm still surprised that a semiotician hasn't tackled the subject.
The pressing question of physiognomy was, what do features refer to? The question we can now ask is, how have we learned to read facial features? Our readings don't infer meaning, they create it.
In the age of cinema and casting, the study of physiognomy seems increasingly relevant.

Today's best

•Does theory make things funny?
•From this week's NY Times Magazine: "My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offspring's rib-eye steaks."

Links for the day

•Butler and Kristeva for a Derrida? No deal. Theory Trading Cards.
•Mystery Link.
•What's in your name? (Results for Nathalie).