February 14, 2005
All the philosophies unfit to print
Peter Edidin of the New York Times trips over his own shoes as he covers a philosophical work by Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit:
Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:
"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."
Frankfurt usefully distinguishes between the simple liar and the bullshitter. Because the simple liar is aware of the truth and wants to skirt it, he has a respect for truth that the bullshit artist lacks. The bullshit artist, caught in his own web of unfounded rhetoric, simply disregards truth as a criterion of sound reasoning, instead relying on persuasive ability as the measure of an argument's strength. In this the bullshitter is trapped in a closed loop of which I've written recently.
The gem in this article comes when Edidin quotes Frankfurt on the origin of his title:
"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "
Now that's some straight shootin'. Rather than "disrupting" his chain of reasoning, the use of the barnyard colloquialism allows Frankfurt to slice directly to the heart of his chosen topic. No bullshit.
Posted by Chris at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
Arriving at certainty
CBS has a new entrant in the inevitably formulaic crimelab-drama genre: "Numbers" or, as their typographers would have it, "NUMB3RS". I suppose the producers must have been Tom Lehrer fans ("he spelled his name Hen3ry -- the '3' was silent, you see"), as the protagonist, Charlie, solves the crimes by scribbling hairy-looking mathematical equations all over the walls. In the first show, he essentially uses the locations of previous rapes to predict -- within a range of probability -- where the serial rapist/killer lives.
Matt Yglesias points out that our hero's chief method -- plotting curves that connect a seemingly-random series of dots on a map -- really isn't an example of sophisticated math. All true: scientists in many disciplines use this type of problem-solving all the time. That said, what struck me in the show is that the hero solves crimes the way George Bush "promotes freedom": ensconced in his room, with minimal input of facts, he consults his first principles and arrives at a formula that precisely locates the danger and specifies a course of action. For Charlie, it's the equation that best fits the scatter of data; for Bush, it's his god.
"Numbers" also acts as an apologia for unbelievably intrusive policing tactics. With an initial (flawed) map of where the bad guy is likely to live, Charlie suggests the police collect DNA data from all males in the neighborhood. When they realize it will be too hard to get a warrant for such a widespread search, the cops decide to do it on the down-low, by gathering discarded cigarette butts, coffee cups, and chewing gum. This tactic requires even more intrusive surveillance than simple cheek swabs, because the subject must be tailed until he drops a suitable object with trace DNA on it. The show lets this sinister abuse of police and technological power go entirely unremarked.
Posted by Chris at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 07, 2005
Elimination of difficulty
The Kinkade-Zeppelin post got my blog more hits than it's ever had in a given period -- thanks, Apostropher! But on a more substantive plane, I wanted to flesh out some thoughts on a question raised by the popularity of Kinkade, and the almost religious fervor of the Zeppelin fans' outrage. The question: Why are Americans so eager not to think?
Musing about this question led me, naturally, to the Wikipedia entry on anti-intellectualism. Bouncing around that page, full of worthy articles and angles, I discovered a little gem of an essay, "Why Nerds are Unpopular". Written by one Paul Graham -- obviously a confirmed nerd himself -- the essay dives deep into the sociology of middle school and high school, and finds at the root that nerds are unpopular because they are too busy with their intellectual pursuits to play the necessary popularity games.
High school is, according to Graham, a court hierarchy, like that of Louis XIV. For complicated political and social reasons, American schools lack external pressures to educate kids well. This means that education becomes largely a sham: content is taught in such a way that it can be memorized by rote, with maximum testability. With a few notable exceptions, teachers base their pedagogy around this fake learning, and students follow their lead. Neither students nor teachers take their education very seriously. In the absence of solid educational criteria that would create a hierarchy among students, a court system develops, one in which "one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank".
Graham identifies several causes of this faux educational structure. To me, the most convincing is the ripple effect of the increasing specialization that comes with modern life. As modernity chugs along, we all become more and more specialized, and the time necessary to educate us increases. But you can't just drop twelve-year-olds off in an automotive repair school or a nursing school and hope they'll thrive; to learn the trade properly they have to be older. This means that you need a place to park them out of their parents' way until they're eighteen or so. Voila, high school is invented, and becomes an enclosed prison space in which incredibly complicated popularity contests are paramount precisely because there is nothing else to do. Here's Graham reflecting on his thirteen-year-old self:
I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.
This passage rang a bell in my head: Suburban exclusion of anything potentially harmful carries an echo of Milan Kundera's famous passage, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, on the nature of kitsch:
Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. ... Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
Put this together with Roger Scruton's excellent definition of kitsch:
What makes for kitsch is not the attempt to compete with the photograph but the attempt to have your emotions on the cheap -- the attempt to appear sublime without the effort of being so.
And there you have it: the interlocking connection of suburban existence, education, and the kitsch imperative. They're all grounded in the put-on, the fake, the sham: deep in our isolated and specialized lives, cocooned in safe suburban sterility, far away from any existential difficulties, we feel a need to invent competitions and emotions to replace that which we have lost. Ergo, kids devise contests around who wears what, and their parents embrace kitsch so they can have an apparently sublime experience that is both shared and unchallenging.
Is there a causative correlation here? Do teenagers grow up into kitsch-lovers because they have been inculcated in the process of shamming education? Or are they educated that way because their parents are accustomed to it? I suppose it must work both ways. Whatever the causal direction, the connection is palpable. Bored beyond belief by a life that lacks any real challenges, teenagers fall into a "crazy time" that is a perfectly rational response to their situation. Hence their obsessive focus on clothes, music, manners of speech -- nearly all centering on a variety of mass-produced consumables. As they become adults, the process continues, but the edges are softened, and the particulars change. The goods change, but the essential urge does not. We must buy, that we do not feel.
Here's Scruton again:
The American funerary culture, so cruelly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, attempts to prove that this event, too -- the end of man's life and his entry into judgment -- is in the last analysis unreal. This thing that cannot be faked becomes a fake. The world of kitsch is a world of make-believe, of permanent childhood, in which every day is Christmas. ... Death demands grief and dignity and suffering. It is therefore kitsched into a sweeter and slushier condition, a childlike slumber that brings sentimental tears.
The kitsch of Kinkade and the anti-intellectual Zeppelin adoration, then, are two sides of the same coin: they are both protective moves that shield a person from difficulty. At the same time, they are responses to a lack of challenge. Without existential troubles faced head-on and eyes-open, we are prey to the easy, saccharine satisfactions of kitsch. Without critical listening and a voicing of opposed opinions, we are tempted toward uncritical hero-worship. Faced with few real threats to our existence, we become more threatened by small ones. Kundera's second tear -- "how nice to be moved, together with all mankind" -- drops with the desire and expectation that all should share exactly the same tastes. And with that tear, another minor threat -- that someone somewhere might disagree with us -- is eliminated.
Posted by Chris at 04:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 30, 2004
Don't require anything of me, please
In some six-degrees blogroll surfing -- don't ask me to unravel the thread of connections -- I discovered two different pairs of threads that seem closely related. First, Michael at Here's What's Left skewers the art of Thomas Kinkade by comparing it to that of Caspar David Friedrich, a 19th-century German. Turns out Kinkade, the end-all and be-all of commercial American art, has borrowed heavily from Friedrich. Of course, in the process, the soul and struggle of Friedrich's work gets siphoned out, leaving only a glib, one-size-fits-all "inspirational" motif.
The Kinkade post is Michael's second in a series on "Conservative Art". The first entry dissects an essay by Larry Kudlow, in which Kudlow promotes his wife's art show by arguing:
I just call it conservative art. Let me tell you what it’s not — it’s not modernistic, abstract, self-centered expressionism. It’s not just throwing paint at a canvas. It doesn’t tear down art, or the rest of the world, for that matter. It’s not the negative pessimistic crap that too often passes for art in blue states like New York and, well, you know where else. These are just beautiful, calm, pleasant pictures. Stuff you can enjoy looking at, which is what I think art should be.
In the Kinkade posting, Michael observes:
Thomas Kinkade, who has met with George W. Bush and apparently prays for him, is not a "conservative artist" because of his political connections or his Christianity, but because he reinforces a strain in modern conservatism that brings out the worst in its adherents. His art is a paltry and more easily digestible weak misreading of basic tropes that have been around for a long time. It is done with the intention of not requiring thought, and perhaps enforcing a lack thereof.
The second related thread was on Jason Chervokas's blog, where a musing post about Led Zeppelin raised some critical questions about the band's more embarassing moments (Tolkien, huge hair, caterwauling, three-hour drum solos, etc). The post got a link on a Zep fan board, and Chervokas was heaped with abuse from dedicated, drooling fans ("Dude, you are one huge fag. I think your secretly into rap" and "Anybody who does'nt worship zeppelin is a lost soul, and I feel sorry for them."). Chervokas responds to the attacks in a very thoughtful followup post in which he laments the preponderance of uncritical, worshipful fans, which, he argues, are bad for the music:
The life cycle of a performer's career seems to begin with that kind of exchange, but, if an artist is lucky enough to hit it big, he or she inevitably seems to reach a point where the kind of sheer adulation preferred by these Zep fans becomes the norm. An ugly cycle begins to dominate a performer's career. Self-indulgence of the worse order sets in (because audiences will lap up any shit they are fed), and a simulacrum of exchange begins to replace real exchange in performance.
Michael's "simulacrum of exchange" in adulating Zep fans very closely mirrors a "simulacrum of thought" by the unthoughtful, unworried Kinkade aficionado. No troublesome thoughts or difficulties need be countenanced; in the conservative view, what is necessary from art (or music) is just pure enjoyment, unrippled by waves of distress or disaster. Those waves might turn your tastes toward "negative pessismistic crap" best enjoyed by a blue stater (read: Other) just as questioning Zeppelin's more absurd moments renders you a gay rap fan (again: Other).
This urge not to think spreads far and wide in our culture. It's the reason plasticine androids like Paris Hilton, who has done nothing on her own initiative except be born rich and famous, are more popular than subtle, intelligent, crisp Tina Fey. It's the underpinning of George W. Bush's support, and the reason his factually-challenged "resolve" isn't exposed for the sham it is. And the whole process of not-thinking perpetuates itself, as Michael observes in his Kinkade essay:
Thomas Kinkade's art is not interesting or complicated, and you don't have to spend much time on it to get it. And if all you look at is Thomas Kinkade's art, you will be trained not to spend much time looking at art. So, like Pavlov's dog, you'll continue to like Kinkade's art precisely because it doesn't require much of you, because you've been trained to do so.
Precisely.
[UPDATE 1/7/2005: I've followed up on some of the larger issues -- namely, the roots of American kitsch and anti-intellectualism -- in this post.]
Posted by Chris at 02:25 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
I must go on
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
That's F. Scott Fitzgerald writing in 1936 (The Crackup). I saw this quote somewhere in Blogistan recently, and it's been floating in and out of my mind, especially in connection with Sunday's earthquake. When you consider a disaster such as this, the impossible contradictions in life can't help but make themselves visible:
That our bodies are incredibly strong self-regulating systems, and unimaginably delicate.
That lives are snuffed out in seconds, and survivors rebuild.
That the earth we stand on is solid and unmoving, and yet the continental plates can leap a hundred feet to the northwest at a time of their choosing.
That those plates sit on mantle rock which is neither solid nor liquid, and is thus both at once.
Coming to grips with the fact of these contradictions, I think, is what people mean by the word "spirituality": a sense of ineffability, or radical otherness, or total insignificance and insufficiency in the face of forces vastly greater than yourself. "Spiritual" applies to the "how" of these contradictions, the grappling with their existence. An existential reckoning, if you will.
"Religion" applies to their "why" -- what person or being ordered these contradictions into existence, and for what reasons? This is a reckoning on a completely different level. It can be used to supplant or hide the necessary existential reckoning, or (by highly evolved believers) to complement and structure it.
So somehow we must manage to maintain two things in our mind, two things that cancel each other out, and still function. George Orwell called this "doublethink", and decried it as a violation of simple logic, which seemed to him structurally and naturally necessary and inviolable. He even thought doublethink had to be taught, conditioned into otherwise logical human minds.
I don't think it's so simple: there is nothing built into the heart of all these somethings, a nullity we use every day to consider things that are not (my keys are not in my pocket) and things that are (I am limited, fragile, subject to whim of earth and muggers). To sit and consider these nothings, without inventing an absent something (god) to comfort me in their presence: that's the difficult thing.
Posted by Chris at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 26, 2004
No metaphysics required
In a post on the Birdhouse earlier this week, Scot noted that
It seems that when I buy a CD, it only gets touched once. Not because it's not good, but because it only needs to be ripped once. After that, it's in iTunes, on the iPod, or pumped to the living room via Airport Express, and the meatspace disc does nothing but take up space. If all I really want is bits, why futz with atoms?
Which led me to comment that the physical presence of musical media is an essential part of their appeal. For me, this is particularly true with LPs, with their unique chemical vinyl smell overlaid with the old-book smell of the dust jackets; their large-format cover art; their irreducible physicality and "there-ness" that forces you to be an active listener: you have to get up every 22 minutes to flip the side.
Scot responded that he doesn't only care about bits, but that digital music has replaced some of the physical aspects of the listening ritual. He even linked to an article of his that laments the loss of "some of the funk" of going to a record store, digging through the bins, and careful handling of the discs themselves. All well and good: Scot mourns the loss of a ritual and a presence as he adopts a new way of doing things. Many would not be so respectful.
But this exchange got me wondering if I am guilty of reinscribing a pernicious logocentrism (or phonocentrism?) into the debate. That is, by celebrating the immediate aspects of the ritual, the things that are present to me, I am privileging the present over the absent. By doing so I invoke a metaphysics of presence in which the ideal experience is one that is immediate: i.e., an experience of pure being beyond any representations. Anything that impinges upon this immediacy taints the experience: so recorded music is inferior to live, and crappy sound is inferior to good sound, and lo-fi digital sound is inferior to uncompressed digital sound. This longing for a transcendental signified, oft expressed as "God" or "pure Being", in which all signification stops because the thing is identical with its representation: it's the classic move of a metaphysics of presence.
But this resistance to digital music is important to me. I cling to the vinyl ritual out of deliberate opposition to mass consumer culture. Vinyl is slow, not terribly convenient, not at all portable, and smelly: all exact opposites of capitalist culture's drive toward fast, sleek, ubiquitous, sanitized technology.
Philip R. Wood, in an excellent essay studying the ebb and flow of Sartrean existentialism, describes the capitalist drive toward endless change thus:
The society created by modern capitalism, in other words, is the first to have required constant change in values -- at all levels -- as the sine qua non of its very existence. This informs so many levels of our existence that we accept it as normal and forget what a recent historical phenomenon it is. One has only to recall the various possible combinations of mildly condescending amusement and nostalgia with which we regard family photographs, intellectual fashions, or even family arrangements or objects of sexual desire of a mere twenty years ago.
Because a metaphysics of presence supposes a transcendental value that undergirds all other values, it is the mortal enemy to capitalism's requirement of constant change. In this way we can see the anti-logocentric project, as expressed by thinkers like Derrida, as an apologia for capitalism's ferocious change obsession. The deconstructive project both describes and creates a subjectivity and a textuality that are constantly at play, never fixed in their meanings, always deferred until later, always different from what they were. All this occurs, of course, in the context of an absolutely vital and necessary undertaking: that of coming to grips with the absence of transcendental values (the "death of God").
I have no particular wish to reinstate transcendental values, or resurrect God. To me, he is comfortably dead. But in his place, contemporary capitalism provides less than nothing: in capitalism's eye, there can be no stable ground, for to provide one would cause the wheels of the machine to stop turning. And this is the difficulty: for how can we resist the machine without recourse to a metaphysical substrate of value?
I have an intuition that we can move toward this by resurrecting not God, but Sartre. His conception of subjectivity is notable in that it exalts human freedom, retaining room for free play and difference, without resting on a metaphysical grounding in which the self is conceived as completely identical to itself, or as emanating from a divine consciousness/being. Because the self, to Sartre, is a nothingness, it cannot be identical to itself: for if you compare nothing to nothing, the comparison fails. In this conception of the self, there is a ground for action, without conceiving that ground as eternal, immutable, transcendental. In other words, the ground of action is expressed in human terms, not divine ones.
So, as humans -- messy, contradictory, ever-changing, non-self-identical -- we can ground our own values on nothing more than the preciousness of free choice. And on the basis of that I can make a case for the continuing appeal of the vinyl ritual: because it is attractive and enjoyable in certain irreducible ways, it provides a way to exercise my own choice of resistance. No metaphysics required.
Posted by Chris at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2004
Human, all-too human
Two incidents of brawling, in radically different contexts, have hit the heavy media rotation this week. First was the fight at the Pistons-Pacers game in Detroit, in which Pacers player Ron Artest jumped into the stands and attacked a fan. Serious mayhem ensued, with various Pacers and Pistons players joining the fisticuffs to stand up for their teammates.
The other shoving match occurred during President Bush's visit to Chile. Chilean guards at first would not allow one of Bush's Secret Service agents to enter a dinner, and a fracas ensued. Bush, noticing the melee, pushed his way to the center of the hubbub and, asserting his alpha dog status, "rescued" the agent.
Majikthise writes about this incident, and her perceptive commenter jrc says:
People love this stuff. I don't remember who said it first, but shrub's voters weren't tricked into voting for him in spite of the fact he's an asshole. That's exactly why they voted for him. Getting into brawls in foreign countries only makes them like him better.Feeds right into the false perception that this is a man that fights his own battles.
The connection between these two incidents is simple: both were fueled by a tribal urge to defend your own "clan" against insult from outside. Not threat, but insult: in neither case was there a particular physical threat; at least, none that withstands scrutiny. No, both Artest and Bush plowed into crowds to earn back respect they felt had been taken from them.
In Salon, King Kaufman writes about the basketball incident:
So many people are at the boiling point when it comes to being dissed because they get dissed so often. It's not that we're living in a violent society, it's that we're living in a disrespectful one. Everyone's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, and, in the sports world anyway, they're increasingly not taking it.
Self-respect is in a tenuous, threatened state for a variety of reasons. The climate of fear due to the ongoing and seemingly interminable "war on terror" is one major factor. Although their daily lives have minimal interruptions due to this "war", aside from occasional commuter-train announcements and longer lines at airports, citizens are feeling the unconscious pull of fear.
The second major threat to self-respect comes from nothing other than a crisis in selfhood. Although we are continually exhorted to "be our selves" and not to base our existence on the approval of others, we are simultaneously faced with a panoply of consumer goods that give us ways to be less ourselves. You can pick from an array of psychopharmaceuticals, edgy fashions, electronic gadgets, musical styles, automobiles, houses, pets, and hobbies. Even technologies of self-discovery are pitched in the vein of a quick fix: you just go on Dr. Phil's show, he tells you what's wrong with you, and you walk away a happier, healthier person, with sentimental music accompanying your exit.
The choice of consumables seems up to you, as long as it involves continued consumption. With a tacit understanding that any activity, however healthy it may be, can be addictive, the culture seems to have decided to give up on the idea of a healthy self-determination: instead, we get to make endless therapeutic purchasing decisions.
The lunging drive to consume, coupled with a culture and politics of terror, serve to create an increasingly isolated society in which no one feels safe going out or interacting beyond their clan boundaries. This isolation is not limited to the individual level. It works societally too, as Norman Birnbaum, writing on the diplomatic dustup in Chile, observes:
Of course, half the nation deplores our increasing isolation in the world community. There is method to the madness of the White House. By evoking systematic opposition abroad, it provides its most fervent supporters with tangible evidence of America's beleaguered state. That in turn serves as justification -- even without colored alerts -- for a perpetual state of domestic emergency. ... The attempt to extend abroad the unconstrained power of the American state is inextricably connected to the offensive against our liberties at home.
A dual tactic of fear and isolation fuels this campaign against the free self. Likewise, anxiety in the face of free selfhood propels people to embrace terror and loneliness. This dialectic makes for an explosive mixture when a threat, whether imagined or real, emerges. One is liable to lash out at anyone nearby who seems guilty, whether they are or not. We've seen this with Bush's redirection of rage from Al Qaeda to Iraq, and we saw it in Detroit too: according to Kaufman, Artest went after an innocent bystander, not the fan who threw the cup of beer at him.
Misdirection, explosive rages, living in a bubble protected from the truth: all logical outcomes of our encapsulation in consumer capitalism. Our leaders lash out at foreign security forces, and our athletes attack us in the stands. Or we respond not with explosive violence, but with a retreat to the comforts of machines. Regular citizens wrap themselves in cars or cell phones or iPods, and the Secretary of Defense and the President use signature machines to sign condolence letters to families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
By ceding this crucial symbol of their agency and their shared grief to the mechanical output of a machine, Rumsfeld and Bush sever themselves from the consequences of their free decision to go to war. And by blaming the brawl on "provocation", Artest and the other players, not to mention the sports commentators who have apologized on their behalf, manage the same evasion of consequences. Responsibility, in the sense of accepting the outcome of your choices, is an essential element in freedom. Without it, we are something less than free: we are animal-machines.
Posted by Chris at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2004
Gotta look for your pitch to hit
My father commented that the last two posts seemed connected by a common thread. I hadn't consciously designed them that way, but now I'll take up the implicit challenge and spell out the connections.
The posts frame two questions: (1) "Are video cameras good for baseball?" and (2) "Are strict, universal standards good (or possible) for software?" The problem underlying each question is a thorny one: What makes us different from machines?
My negative answer to question (2) stems from the fact that machines do not, as yet, possess any kind of generative, creative capability. They lack the associative intelligence that is critical for bridging separate domains of study; they can only deal with the objects that are directly modeled for them by the programmer, and can't perceive the homologies of structure between different modeling domains. Your checkbook software, for example, can't handle your datebook needs, even though there is a homology of structure between a checkbook entry (time, date, to whom/from whom the payment was made, etc) and a calendar appointment. If your computer had intelligence like you do, it could adapt to your needs by realizing the structural similarity between the different types of data you are giving it. Instead, it has to be programmed individually to respond properly to the requirements of different activities or data structures.
The generative capacity is intimately linked to our faculty of free choice. To sum it up in the language of Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness I've been reading recently, consciousness has being, but yet is not a thing in the same way a table is a thing. Consciousness has the peculiar ability to transcend its factual existence as a thing (a brain) and posit possibilities that it is not (a mind). Our brains are things, organic substances full of fermenting chemistry, but yet our minds are something else: they have the capacity to negate being, to go beyond what is given and make choices. This choice-making ability, the possession of an interior negation, shows up in part in our capacity to generalize from one world-model to another. A mere understanding thing, one which lacked the capacity of negation, could never transcend the factual givens to make a generalizing leap across disparate domains. In other words, without freedom, a thinking computer could not truly think. It would forever be stuck at the level of the models given to it.
What you see with advocates of video review in sports is a wish to correct for human fallibility, to constrain human choice and judgement under the (supposedly) objective eye of a machine. Instant replay does this already in football, which is a sport heavily given over to the machinization of human activity. (This is no coincidence, considering football's allegorical reenactment of military operations.) In football, everyone has their assigned and specialized routine, and orders are given by a team of coaches linked up by headsets; there is very little room for creative action on the field, because all the possibilities have been worked out beforehand and drilled into the players' minds with a set-play handbook. The players are following a script, and the referees are following a script too -- a script that is subject to instant correction at the hands of the video replay unit. It's telling that when a referee goes to review a play, he has to bend over and submerge himself in the black shroud of the replay machine.
While replay is an interruption to football, it is not so directly antagonistic to the spirit of the sport. But in baseball, the disruptiveness of video review arises from the centrality of human choice. The whole core of the game consists in the batter's being given a strictly limited number of opportunities from which he picks a pitch to hit. From this limited three-strikes and four-balls set piece (notwithstanding foul balls) he must find a pitch that is acceptable to him, or strike out. He gets a finite set of chances, and he must choose -- even if he chooses not to choose and strikes out looking. There is an infinity lurking as a possibility in this finite set of choices, which is the possibility that an at-bat may go on forever (the batter can foul off as many pitches as he likes, if he can reach them). This infinity-wrapped-in-finitude mirrors the human condition as an organic (limited, contingent) being which can make free (infinite, undetermined) choices. By introducing an element of mechanical judgement onto the field, this whole beautiful structure of freedom is turned into a machine-operated contest, where the machine's opinion becomes the root and standard of the human activity.
Similarly, with a universalist approach to software standards, you see humans engaged in structure-making that essentially capitulates their thinking human nature to the formal, rigorous nature of machine "thought". Scot's comment to the effect that machines are stupid and so we need to provide them with formally-defined inputs is absolutely correct. But that contention hides the fact that we are lowering our standards to the level of the machine we are supposedly controlling. By adopting and propagating rigid standards we become like the machines we operate, and thereby lose something of what makes us unique as thinking, negating, creatively generative beings.
It's absolutely true that defined standards have utility for programmers. It's much easier to program when you have a framework for how to define your data, organize your code, name your variables, and so on. But this is the same as saying it's easier to be a machine than to be a human being. Computers are limited, stupid, mechanical machines, while humans are free, unlimited animals. It's essential to keep in mind the difference, even as you adopt machine-talk in order better to cope with the limitations of the machine-intelligence.
Posted by Chris at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2004
Standards vexation
Scot, flummoxed by a problem with Firefox's strict standards requirements, posted asking for help. I had none to give, at least none of the practical variety, but it gave rise to a pertinent general question: Are software standards good for us? This question leads to another, even more troubling one: Are they even possible?
My answer to the first question is a qualified "no". The problem with strict standards is that anything that fails them doesn't work, period. A strict standard precludes the possibility of "failing gracefully", i.e., failing to render a particular element, but doing so in such a way that the user's experience isn't entirely ruined.
The second problem is that software changes too quickly to adhere to a single standard. Constant development of new possible elements quickly exceeds the bounds of even the most abstract, generalized formal system of standards. The goal of the standard -- that you can have code that will run flawlessly on different environments without human maintenance -- falls prey to the progress imperative. There will always be a new version of a must-have browser which contains features not covered in the standard, and then thousands of programmers must update their old code to conform and exploit the new feature set.
Jaron Lanier, in his One Half a Manifesto, muses about the nightmare scenario of artificially intelligent computers run amok, to the point where they supersede humanity and render (organic) intelligence obsolete. Such a "technological singularity" event presupposes global interoperability of these computers: i.e., they would have to have perfect communication with one another on the basis of some standard. Lanier argues such a singularity is impossible, because
There is no giant monolithic electronic brain being created with biological knowledge. There is instead a fractured mess of data and modeling fiefdoms. The medium for biological data transfer will continue to be sleep-deprived individual human researchers until some fabled future time when we know how to make software that is good at bridging bubbles on its own.
Unless the standard can bridge its own bubbles, to cope with and correctly dispatch flawed syntax, the many "modeling fiefdoms" will always impose their heterogeneity. And a standard that is able to generatively correct for errors would have all the important traits of that which currently handles the corrections: the human mind. Thus we should be grateful that the standards are not yet globally perfect and self-correcting: for as soon as they become so, we're out of a job.
Posted by Chris at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)
The eephus camera
Roy Edroso says "je refuse!" to video review in baseball, with a plea for the charm of the old school:
I'm an old crank and I want players to wear baggy pants and have names like "Cap." Well, not really. But too much tech is too much tech, and baseball's threshold of too-much is lower than that of most other endeavors.
I like the baggy pants, high socks, and funky names as much as the next crank. It's one reason I like the players with old school affectations like Nick Swisher or Barry Zito or even El Duque. The latter has the cojones to tug his socks high, wear cashmere turtlenecks off-field, and use an absurd swanlike windup. He even throws an eephus pitch, the very antithesis of modern power pitching techniques.
Edroso says that video review would slow the game down too much, and make mere mortals of the umpires, who are supposed to be Jehovan authorities on-field. I heartily agree here. But I have to disagree with him when he says that the batters' stepping out of the box is contributing to the intolerable slowness of baseball. The between-pitch routines are absolutely essential to the subtle psychology between batter and pitcher. Each is trying to upset the other's rhythm, timing, and routine. With each aware that the other is doing this, the guesses and second-guesses and third-guesses and nth-guesses stack upon one another in an infinite regress unmatched in any other sport. "He knows I like to hit a first-pitch fastball, so I'll probably see something else, but he knows that I know that he knows this, so perhaps he'll surprise me with exactly what I want." And so on. Without the cat-and-mouse stepping in and out of the batter's box, or on and off the pitcher's rubber, this self-contained mutual guessing would fade into the background, and the pitcher-batter relationship would not have nearly the subtlety it does.
Video review would violate the relationship too, by injecting a new element to upset timing. The pitcher and batter provide the timing for every play. Without their mutual agreement, there can be no play. If video review is allowed to interrupt the game, their centrality is destroyed. New tools like Questec pitch tracking, which lets the league penalize umpires for bad ball/strike calls, works non-invasively: the information is collected and only released to the umpire after the game. It's standing over the umpire's shoulder, yes, but it isn't speaking. Video review would produce a new and disruptive "voice" on the field, one which would drown out the pastoral quiet and self-contained simplicity that defines the game.
Posted by Chris at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2004
Culture of overconsumption
It's been a good media week for the fat acceptance movement. The Guardian ran an extensive excerpt from Paul Campos's upcoming book The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous To Your Health. Campos essentially argues that the notion that being overweight is a health hazard is a construction of a moralistic health industry that stands to profit from imposing strict, unrealistic standards on consumers.
Salon gets into the act this week too, with a review of Wendy Shanker's book The Fat Girl's Guide to Life that also surveys some of the recent thinking on our attitudes toward fat. And a very fat-positive piece in the Times ran this weekend, quoting historian Peter Stearns:
19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. "I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations," he said in an interview. "Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence," Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism.
Here we see that the rise of anti-obesity attitudes roughly correspond to the temperance movements, themselves moralizing outgrowths of homegrown American puritanism. Throw in a dash of American consumer guilt, and you have a fresh recipe for inducing hysteric attempts at self-control. Campos:
For upper-class Americans in particular, it's easier to deal with anxiety about excessive consumption by obsessing about weight, rather than by actually confronting far more serious threats to our social and political health. We may drive environmentally insane SUVs that dump untold tonnes of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere... but at least we don't eat that extra cookie when it's offered to us.
So far, it sounds a lot like the addiction treatment industry, which stretches at every turn the sphere of behaviors it considers addictive, requiring expensive treatments and radical, moralizing interventions -- all while ducking essential questions about what it means to be human, to be an independent self. Mainstream addiction treatments throws a dependence-based solution -- submitting your life to the "steps" -- at a dependence-based problem, not coincidentally making the subject feel powerless and inadequate. In much the same way, weight-loss programs fail to break the cycle of consumerist frenzy that is the real problem -- indeed, they feed on the cycle itself, arguing that you must only become a better consumer of the latest diet pills/programs/exercises in order to become slim.
And in the process, your sense of self worth is destroyed. It's a nice way to make a quick buck.
Posted by Chris at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2004
Peaks and peneplains
My thinking on whether originality is possible, or even desirable, is expanding way beyond the bounds of a simple conversation about Liz Penn's spam screed. In his comment, Scot points out that I've unfairly characterized him as a neofetishist, and says "A guitar solo doesn't have to be novel to rock." I couldn't agree more here. But the "passionate but unoriginal" guitar solo is separated from the "banal and derivative" one by the thinnest of aesthetic threads.
I don't think you can even pin it down in discursive terms -- there's no theoretical underpinning or principle that will allow you to distinguish the sublime from the hack. You have to rely on some variant of "I knows it when I sees it". If you could specify in abstract and general terms what makes a great performance, someone would turn that specification into a paint-by-numbers plan, and the necessary spontaneity would be extinguished forever.
This all reminds me of what Cary Tennis had to say about peak experiences -- that by their very nature, their sharp and jagged edges will become rounded and dull with time. The mindblowing breakthroughs in art, given the passage of time and their inevitable domestication, will seem tame, unthreatening, safe. All you can do is cherish the memory of the peak; you can't bottle it, you can't reproduce it, you can't represent it. The time I was completely merged with the music and lights at a Stereolab concert is gone -- time has carried away those jagged peaks and worn it down into a sandy peneplain.
What's left is to appreciate the subtle beauty of that flat, slightly rolling surface for what it is, and not succumb to the temptation for endless, empty intake of new peak stimuli. The culture wants you to think that flat is boring. The plains are so simple and so featureless that with a single glance everyone thinks they've experienced the whole story. On the flats, nothing can be marketed, because nothing stands out.
Harvey Keitel's character in Smoke takes the same photograph from outside his shop at the same time every day for ten years. He knows about the value of repetition, and close observation, and the subtle differences that make each individual photograph different from the next. An act that looks like a crude mechanical reproduction of the same image, the very essence of empty capitalist production, turns out to be an intensely anti-industrial act: he has to be in front of his shop at the same time every day, interacting with people, an inviolable and irreducibly personal ritual. It doesn't produce a peak experience, but it can't be bottled and sold. It's his, and his alone, even if it appears banal to the flyover observer.
Posted by Chris at 10:54 AM | Comments (6)
April 12, 2004
Nothing new under the sun
Scot and I had an interesting discussion at Leila's Jesus Grill yesterday (served: lamb, beef, chopped-up Marshmallow Peeps). I mentioned to him that the brilliant and almost-always right Liz Penn had blogged what I felt to be a highly eloquent screed against spam:
All the way up on the train, I felt an intangible shame and disgust, a dread at meeting anyone’s eyes, a feeling of emerging from some dark pit of linguistic degradation. But somewhere around Tuckahoe Station, I made the executive decision to alchemically convert that shame into rage. How dare you, Mr. Pussy? (I take the liberty of addressing you as “Mr.” since the default sex of the human being is apparently male, an assumption your colleagues have made freely as they express their ongoing concern for my need for penile enhancement.) How dare you pollute my beautiful pristine comment boxes, waiting in all innocence to be filled with thoughtful comments from readers throughout New Zealand, with your onslaught of meaningless filth? (I generally shy away from such ideologically loaded dichotomies as “purity” and “filth," but as Groucho Marx said, in your case I’ll make an exception.)Scot, though, wondered if there could possibly be anything new to say about spam. "Spam is bad," he said, "I don't like spam." And other formulae come to mind too: "Random-word spam poetry can be funny." "Spammers should be shot" and its many variants (castrated, locked up in a room with Ann Coulter, eaten by squid, etc). So, pace Scot, I suppose we should paraphrase Wittgenstein and say "whereof others have already spoken, we must pass over in silence."
But there is nothing new under the sun, and the White Stripes are still good, dammit, even if they are not exactly innovative. Postindustrial capitalism makes a fetish of the original -- or rather, of the new -- because new ground is marketable ground. We're required to be up-to-date, with-it, new; if we're not, we're last year's model. And so the linguistic pleasures of a writer plying her craft against a common annoyance get swept under the table and summarized in three billboard-ready words: "Spam is bad."
I'm not writing this as a screed against Scot's take on the issue. It's not Scot who's doing this as an individual. Rather I want to point up a structural bias against old territory that's very troublesome to me. I want to defend the pleasure of unoriginality, of unoriginal themes performed in an original way -- an immediate way -- an honest way.
But I realize that it's extremely difficult to defend these without lapsing into troublesome "ideologically loaded dichotomies", without sounding like a paleoconservative longing for the good ol' traditional days -- which I decidedly am not. Is it still possible to find a space between the hidebound conservative ("tradition for its own sake") and the corrosive avant-garde ("the new for its own sake")? The endless quest for new and different pleasures seems as toxic and demeaning as the blind acceptance of old pleasures. Where to find the space of freedom between them?
Posted by Chris at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)
April 03, 2004
Self-reliance
A.O. Scott has a very interesting short take on Eternal Sunshine today. He uses Stanley Cavell's history of 1930's and '40s marriage comedies to show how Charlie Kaufman weaves dense philosophical strands into Sunshine's script:
How much do we know, Mr. Kaufman asks - about ourselves, about the world we inhabit, and, most crucially, about other people - and when do we know it? What do we do with this knowledge, and what good does it do us? If learning can be dangerous, is unlearning - in this case the literal erasure of memory, as practiced by Tom Wilkinson's ethically compromised Dr. Mierzwiak - any safer?
I felt this way when I saw the film, too -- that it was addressing not just relationships but the nature of the mind, and the self, in general. Many scenes play as concretizations of the unconscious, with all its slippery, associative logic; meanings shift, perspectives skew, contradictions are embraced.
The film drives toward a moral conclusion that it is possible to weave a peculiar kind of "stability" out of this chaos -- a stability that is not metaphysical and monolithic, but temporary and provisional. Clementine tells Joel, "I'm going to get bored and freak out, that's just me" to which he replies, simply, "Okay". He doesn't need to spin grand protestations of his love here; he merely responds with a pragmatic, workaday affirmation. His acceptance of her faults does not occur on a cosmic plane, grounded in abstract, glowing, eternal love; it is practical, local, specific. Scott:
[Joel and Clementine] are profoundly imperfect, possessed of a prickly individuality that leaves him or her often out of sorts with the rest of the world. (This restless, nonconforming urge, the true meaning of Emersonian self-reliance, is evoked by her ever-changing hair and his feverish notebook jottings.) The only cure is for them to become more themselves, which they can accomplish only in each other's company.
For a film so sensitive to the vagaries of memory and the mind, I don't think "Emersonian self-reliance" is quite the optimal framework. Maybe, rather, a postmodern self-reliance, one which brackets the notion of self within the idea that it is shifty, dependent, interwoven with the other; a concept of self that does not try to trap the other, or itself, in a permanent or isolated definition. Yes, become more yourself, but do it with the recognition that your self is constantly changing, and that it is bound up with the selves of others.
Posted by Chris at 09:53 AM | Comments (1)
April 02, 2004
Death of the real
I'm not normally a fan of Jean Baudrillard. His followers' emphasis on the "death of the real" has always irritated me, seeming more like a bourgeois justification of empty-headed pop cultural pursuits and trivial semiotics. But this Google Gmail business, I think, can be best understood in terms of Baudrillard's hyperreal: the real has been abolished behind an endless proliferation of signs, all pointing at one another -- the "real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself".
Look at it this way: The press release, itself an advertisement, is put out on April Fool's Day. Within this ad is the news that email will now be offered for "free", the only catch being the delivery of ads that are keyed to the email's content. The prospective customer is made an offer to trade her privacy for a gigabyte of storage and an email account.
Since April 1st is the traditional day when everything is taken as a simulacrum, everyone immediately assumes it's a joke -- ie., a put-on, a prank, a fake. Then the discourse takes a new line: Can we tell if it's really a joke or not? It seems that it really wasn't a joke, but that in itself is the joke: a press release too good to be true, which turns out to be true, released on April Fool's.
Google's press department has proved themselves masters of the Baudrillardian hyperreal. This is particularly apt use of reality-abolishing discourse, too, because it was an essential distraction from the nasty open secret of Gmail: that it will open your most private thoughts to the keyworded intervention of advertisers. The candy of a good joke makes the bitter pill of a new invasion of privacy easier to swallow, and the obvious objections disappear behind a dismissive "some privacy advocates say"...
The harsh, brutal reality is that a corporation will now be able to read your email, not just occasionally when a court intervenes, but as a matter of policy. But that reality is completely obscured by the play of this press release as a "joke" that turned out "true".
I think the joke's on us.
Posted by Chris at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
Big Brother is you, reading your email
Well, it's April 2nd, and Google's GMail site is still up. The consensus seems to be that it's real, and that it's brilliant, and will make them piles upon piles of money.
I think it's telling that the objections are couched in terms of "some privacy advocates say there are problems". From the AP wire article:
[Google founder Larry] Page said Gmail shouldn't raise serious privacy concerns because Google plans to closely guard the content of the e-mail messages. ... "We think e-mail is one of those things that is not as useful and as well organized as it should be," Page said.
In other words, "we promise not to look at your email". That's what a service provider has to do in any case -- the system operator can always snoop your email box -- but scanning emails to place ads raises the stakes of this. The entire world has become an advertising zone. Even our own bodies are part of it; yesterday I saw a young African-American woman wearing a vinyl jacket with the "Oreo" and "Ritz" logos plastered on the back. (Try to unpack the dense symbology of that particular combination of signs!)
Further, plugging Orkut into GMail would give them a profile of what you are writing, to whom, and how often, cross-referenced with what you have searched for and purchased; it's total demographic awareness. It's too juicy a technology not to be appropriated by the government at some point down the road -- kind of a privatized Total Information Awareness.
Ads are so ubiquitous that barely a peep is heard to object to this new curtailment of ad-free space. Indeed, it's hardly possible to dissent from this -- after all, they're just doing it out of capitalistic necessity. If you don't want the ads, you can pay for your email (which essentially means that you're underwriting the ads anyway). The opening of a new advertising frontier is synonymous with the "organization" of the chaotic electronic realm, in much the same way that the obsolescence of cash will "organize" and, importantly, render trackable the lawless underground economy. Soon, only outlaws will use cash, and only outlaws will use paid email -- because they will be the only ones with anything to hide.
Posted by Chris at 06:57 AM | Comments (1)
April 01, 2004
Enhance this, buddy
So Google chose an interesting day -- April Fool's Day -- to announce their new free email service, Gmail. But apparently, it's legit, or so the posters on Birdhouse say; NPR also carried the story this morning. So it's either a particularly brilliant cross-media prank, with the good folks of NPR and CNN and some other news bureaus in on the joke, or it's for real.
Assuming for the sake of argument that it's real, there's something extremely troubling about Gmail -- they are going to scan your email and deliver ads based on the content found therein. Here's what the Gmail FAQ says:
Gmail does include relevant text ads that are similar to the ads appearing on the right side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program.
By using the AdSense tech, they plan to "enhance" your experience. But the privacy implications are quite disturbing. Even though they claim that "no humans read your email", if the content can be scanned, it can be stored; if it can be stored, it can be analyzed; if it can be analyzed, it can be abused. Abused as in: read or distributed by a disgruntled employee; hacked by a malicious outsider; subpoenaed by law enforcement.
Furthermore, the content-scanning presumably works both ways. So, if I send you a bunch of pornographic emails on your Gmail account, wouldn't that tilt the ads you see toward a more risque direction? And are you as an outsider really comfortable sending mail to a Gmail user, knowing that it will be pattern-matched and databased? And what if your Gmail account receives only spam mail? Wouldn't the AdSense server choke on the sheer meta-ness of it all and disappear in a puff of self-referential advertising logic?
Altogether it's hard to see how this is a "user enhancement". A gigabyte of free storage isn't worth having your email read, even if it's just a machine doing the reading.
Posted by Chris at 09:43 PM | Comments (1)
March 30, 2004
Why I'm not on Orkut
I've received a couple of invites to join Orkut, google's invite-only social network thingy. I could probably use more friends, but I'm not going to join this particular phenomenon. As my high school classmate Jeremy Zawodny points out, here and here, google wants to plug your social network into their search mechanisms. Orkut is "bait" to get you to register -- and provide extremely detailed demographic information -- so that they can track your search habits against your personal profile. But with the social network software, they get not only your demographics, but a list of your friends, and their demographics, not to mention their search histories.
My demographics aren't that revealing, although I try to be miserly about who gets 'em, and I frequently provide bogus data (usually I pretend to be a woman born in 1900 living in the 90210 zip code). But my google search habits are quite personal. By trolling the list you could learn quite a lot about me -- and not just that I'm a heavy google user.
If you're a little uncomfortable with that, you should be. Just imagine the law enforcement potential of this data: your entire social network, cross-referenced with your google search history, available to the cops. It's just a subpoena away.
Posted by Chris at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2004
Accidental capitalism addict
There's an interesting piece about the mythical OxyContin epidemic by Maia Szalavitz in Slate this week. The piece goes in two oddly conflicting directions, however. On the one hand, Szalavitz offers a refreshing breath of sanity as she debunks the idea that OxyContin can cause "accidental addiction" simply by being prescribed:
[T]he entire OxyContin "epidemic" is based on a false narrative that asserts that the majority of OxyContin addicts begin as drug-naive pain patients. ... addiction is the exception, not the rule, among people exposed to opiates. Studies consistently show that pain patients taking opiates are no more likely to become addicts than people in the general population (i.e., exposure alone does not cause addiction).
This is all true. The conventional wisdom's narratives about addiction are very misleading. They present the notion that the drug itself makes the choices against the addict's will, that there is no choice involved, and that taking the drug, because entirely compelled, is devoid of meaning. Nothing could be further from the truth. People take drugs for much the same reason they do anything else: to provide structure and meaning in their lives, to have something to do, to produce a desired subjective effect.
Some people become "addicted", that is, they devote abnormal and damaging amounts of their time to the use of the drug, and give up other activities, damage their bodies, etc. But at the root of all of this, there is a choice that the person has made. The concept of addiction is a way to explain why a person continues to take damaging drugs in the face of disastrous consequences. Such behavior seems irrational, and humans are assumed to be essentially rational, so pathology -- "the addiction" -- is invoked to explain the unreasonable nature of the addict's behavior.
Szalavitz recognizes this, in part, by showing that pain patients do not necessarily become addicted. That is, they are taking the drug for a reason -- pain -- and when the pain goes away they will stop, because they have no more reason to take the drug. The "addict" has a prior reason -- depression, or schizophrenia, or whatever -- which is unlikely to go away without other intervention, and so they will continue taking the drug.
That's the good part of Szalavitz's essay. But she is still tied to the good drug/bad drug dichotomy, and her article moves in the service of corporate interests. A good drug (OxyContin) comes from a corporation, and is prescribed by a doctor. A bad drug comes from the black market, and is sold on the street. Her organization, STATS, has some very intriguing and critically engaged articles on drug use and drug war policy. But ultimately, Szalavitz seems to put all her faith in corporate pharmaceutical companies to prevent innocent people from becoming addicted:
Good drugs and good doctors are being defamed by reporters and prosecutors based on conventional -- and discredited --wisdom about addiction. ... Where is big pharma's clout when we need it?
Given big pharma's role in the construction of addiction and the maintenance of prohibition on unpatentable drugs, it's very peculiar that Szalavitz's voice of reason also comes with an unspoken committment that there's a capitalist solution to every problem. Her essay proves that you can quit the conventional dogma, but it's not so easy to get the capitalist monkey off your back.
Posted by Chris at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2004
Sun Green started makin' waves
Went with some folks last night to see Greendale, Neil Young's latest film project. Shot on a 16-mm underwater camera, it's the visual and narrative equivalent of his music: raw, gritty, loud, simplistic, elemental, activist. As a piece of filmmaking, it's B-/C+ work; as a music video, it's A++. I think if it's watched as such -- as a translation of music to screen, and not as a narrative film -- it could redefine the whole notion of music videos. The music itself feels like an extended cut of "Mother Earth: Natural Anthem" (from Ragged Glory) to which a story and visuals have been added.
At any rate, in this Wired interview Neil says:
One of my pet projects is to run the next Greendale tour on biodiesel. It gives off 80 percent less emissions. I'll drive the hugest SUV and 90 percent of the people who are yelling at me will be polluting more than I am. We'll show everyone that we can move in this capitalist system, deliver the goods, and not pollute. If we travel with a giant thermos-bottle truck with biofuel written on the side, the TV people will come. Then I'll be able to prostitute myself for something positive, instead of just selling a record.
Although it's hard to imagine two men more different from each other, it sounds like Neil is channelling Robert Fripp's liner notes from Let the Power Fall:
Commitment to an aim within an inappropriate structure will give rise to the creation of an appropriate structure.
Posted by Chris at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
Erosion
Cary Tennis is a smart guy. Responding to a woman who wants to marry her boyfriend, but is troubled by persistent thoughts of an intense affair she had in college, he has this to say:
One of the things addicts do -- and believe me, this is my nature I'm talking about -- is we have a peak experience and we try to stay up there. Instead of letting it pass and contemplating it with awe from a distance, instead of feeling the bittersweetness of the world's fleeting joys, we want to keep eating the candy.
So far so good. I have a bit of a problem with the essentialism of "the things addicts do" -- as if you could draw a sharp line between the addicted and the nonaddicted -- and I'd rather substitute "humans" for "addicts" here. But Tennis's own argument, as he continues it, makes that case for me, albeit implicitly:
But you can't bottle what happened to you. You will have other intense, enlightening, mind-bending experiences, but each one will be singular and unforeseen. It's only the addict who thinks you can keep getting that same high. (I suppose therein lies the link between addiction and mass production.)
The equivalence between mass production and addiction undermines his claim that it's only the addict who thinks this way. The structure of addiction -- of wanting to "bottle" and repeat the peak experiences -- is part and parcel of mass culture; it's built into the nature of capitalism, if not the whole logic of being.
But it really gets good in the wrapup:
But keep in mind that whatever you make routine will no longer be spectacular: No sooner do you try to build in such peak experiences then their peaks become rounded.
From the revelations of your first acid trip to the pathetic banality of your hundredth; from the fresh excitement of Mondrian's paintings to the static, trapped design dullness of a coffee mug with the same design; from the odd uniqueness of Warhol's soup cans to the dreary art school rehashing ("look, it's different, because it's a tuna can"); from the raging eccentricity of the Stooges to the domesticated rebellion of the Strokes. Consumer culture requires the peak experiences, but can only imitate and level them into mediocrity.
The peaks become rounded: the inexorable law of cultural, and psychic, erosion.
Posted by Chris at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2004
Constitutive other
I've been reading Helen Keane's excellent book What's Wrong with Addiction? (reviewed here) which is a critical look at the discourse of addiction and drugs. She uses a variety of thinkers from Derrida and Deleuze to Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler to perform a deconstruction of overdetermined, reified concepts of addiction. I'm especially interested in her reading of a study, outlined here, which used brain imaging to compare "normal" subjects with "addicted" ones:
The method was PET scan, an imaging procedure that shows which areas in the living human brain are activated by certain stimuli. There are two groups of subjects -- people who had never used cocaine, and people who had been cocaine abusers in the past but had not used any in recent months. Two kinds of cue were presented on video tape -- a neutral one (such as a pastoral scene), and a cocaine-related one (such as injection equipment). Subjects who had never used cocaine showed no unusual brain activity when exposed to either kind of cue. Subjects who had abused cocaine in the past were not affected at all by a neutral cue; but they responded very differently to a cocaine-related cue. Intense craving was provoked, and specific brain areas lit up on the PET scan -- areas in parts of the brain (frontal cortex and amygdala) that are known to be associated with emotional memories and craving.
This study is very interesting because it points to how the technologies of brain imaging are used to confirm pre-existing notions of addiction and disease. The subjects have already been divided into the two groups: normal and addicted, based on the model that addiction is a disease which causes an irreversible and essential change in the brain. Then differing brain reactions to the same stimuli are taken as positive proof of the altered nature of the addict's brain, when in fact the same changes could be read in a whole variety of different ways: as the emotional response engendered by a reaction to a powerful memory, for example.
The brain images are supposed to provide the key to unlock the secret of who is an addict and who is not, but the researchers have already decided this by looking at behavioral cues, self-report, and individual history. But these individuated factors are too fuzzy and too vague for the scientific understanding, which needs to reify itself into the certainty of an objective image. So instead of the infinite diversity of addictions, and the vast variety of stories one might tell about different people using different drugs in different cultures at different times, we have one story -- a metanarrative -- that perceives addiction as a single thing with a universal track.
That universality slights the individual history of addiction and the particular, quirky problem that it poses within a lived experience. Instead of world-unfolding Dasein, we have concrete captured Essence. The polarity of normal/addicted also gets mapped very conveniently onto good/evil and natural/artificial distinctions, making the addict into the "other" that constitutes the normal (this is Keane channeling Judith Butler, of course, but also Derrida's pharmakon).
More later on the parallel between the use of brain imaging to classify normal vs addicted brains, and the use of same to classify male vs female brains, and how that relates to yesterday's post on creativity and porn.
Posted by Chris at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2004
Squeeze my lemon
In an endearingly rambling post that needlessly denigrates Noam Chomsky and Ani DiFranco -- and the fans thereof -- Andrew at The Poor Man trots out an intriguing thesis: "fan outrage is directly proportional to fan idol suckiness". We're undecided on that premise, but it allows Andrew to just about nail the appeal of Led Zeppelin:
Led Zep? It is certainly true that a combination of big toilet brush hair, doll-sized denim outfits, dead sharks, and needle drugs hidden in a hollowed-out copy of The Silmarillion leads to some rather embarrassing moments. And yet, despite these handicaps, they manage to rock fucking balls, dude, and so almost 50% of fans surveyed have a sense of humor. No need to be defensive when you drop riffs like that. Rock on.
So yeah, despite the gratuitous Noam and Ani knocks, and the Wesley Clark support, and the extremely troubling mascot thing on his page, The Poor Man continues to blog some of the heaviest riffs on the net, day after day. So we'll keep listening. Uh, reading. Blog on!
Posted by Chris at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2004
Faith to be found in actuarial tables
A risk assessor in Ohio, elevating his profession to the stature of theology, has concluded that god is 67% likely to exist.
But -- like the weatherman's "65% chance of rain" -- this number is subject to some interpretation. Does that mean that (1) 67% of the time, god exists somewhere? Or that (2) in 67% of possible universes, she exists? Or that (3) god exists in 33% of the universe, but not the other 67%? Or that merely (4) the statistic indicates a 100% probability that its creator is a doofus?
I favor interpretation (4).
(Via Calpundit)
Posted by Chris at 03:31 PM | Comments (2)
February 29, 2004
How many roads must a man walk down?
Matt Yglesias goes into philosophy major mode to discuss the Sorites Paradox: a class of arguments generated from vague predicates. For example, if you have one grain of sand, that's not a heap. If you have two grains of sand, that's not a heap either. But if you have ten million grains, that is certainly -- by any commonsense definition -- a heap. But the conclusion of the Sorites paradox denies that ten million grains make a heap (by inference from the fact that an individual grain added does not make a prior non-heap collection of sand into a heap).
So at what point can you say that you have a "heap" of sand? The philosophical problem is that of vagueness, something which philosophers are congenitally given to hate. The problem is applicable to much more than sand heaps: when can you say a man is bald? (That's Yglesias's quandary.) Or when can you say that a human life begins? Or how can you know when someone is rich?
This site details the 4 types of responses to the paradox in formal logic terms. One can (1) take the Frege/Russell way out, and deny that vague expressions have any place in logic whatsoever. Or one can (2) take an epistemically skeptical point of view, and say that the collection of grains becomes a heap, but only at an unknowable, indeterminate number of grains. Or (3) you can domesticate vagueness into a formal system that has more than two truth states (a many-valued logic). Or (4) you can accept the paradox, and conclude that there are no heaps of sand (and conversely, that one grain of sand is a heap).
I think I like Wittgenstein's solution to the problem the best. It's a modulation of the Russell tactic -- ie. he denies that soritical expressions are welcome within the realm of logic -- but it's more subtle, because Wittgenstein's philosophical project embraces much more than Russell's pure formal system of logic. It's quoted on this comprehensive vagueness site:
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus proceeding according to exact rules.
"In our discussions," ie., in philosophical circles, we try to apply a calculus of exact rules. But that's exactly what you shouldn't do, according to Wittgenstein, because it obscures the simple truth in everyday language: that heaps of sand exist, and we know them when we see them. The "precise point at which a collection becomes a heap" is just a wild goose chase beyond the boundaries of formal language -- "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Posted by Chris at 06:50 PM | Comments (4)
Noise Pop sells out
Last night I went to Cafe Du Nord, mostly to see Kelly Stoltz, a great local singer/songwriter with the whole John Cusack sensitive guy thing going on. His set was pretty enjoyable, but it bothered me that the show, part of Noise Pop 2004, was heavily underwritten by Miller High Life. There was a Miller sign on one wall, with a red spotlight specifically placed over it. There were cases of Miller onstage, and all the musicians were drinking it through their sets. Not only that, but the Noise Pop logo has been engineered to resemble the Miller logo. It's tremendously disappointing that an assiduously indie festival has had to get big corporate backing. I mean, couldn't they cull together a few decent microbrewery sponsorships? I'm sure Sierra Nevada has the money -- and the audience -- to underwrite such a thing. Still corporate, but small, and (relatively) local, and that makes all the difference. The Miller sponsorship just left a bad taste in my mouth -- not to mention the highly cliched and irritating BritPop/Beach Boys/Weezer sounds of headliners The Tyde. Their music was as cynically engineered, commercial, and lifeless as their main sponsor's product.
Posted by Chris at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2004
Love's as good as soma
Ever-thoughtful, embarassingingly cherubic Matt Yglesias comments on the new Easterbrook opus, The Progress Paradox. He thinks the book is going after the wrong question:
The real progress paradox isn't "why doesn't all our stuff make us happy" but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn't make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.On the personal level, when I got my first cell phone, I was thrilled with it. By a couple weeks ago, as reported on Wonkette, I was at Best Buy complaining about how crappy my old phone was. Then it broke on Friday, and today my spiffy new one should come in the mail. Getting the new phone will make me happy for, maybe, a week or two, but soon enough it's just going to be part of the landscape. That fact is totally clear to me, and yet I still want the new phone. I'm hoping to move out of my shitty basement in a few months into a nicer place, but I'm well aware that after occupying the hypothetical new place for a while, I'll just start taking it for granted.
I think this about nails it. The answer to "why we come to have all this stuff" is pretty easy if you think in terms of sustainability. We spend a lot of time and money acquiring things that give us temporary, unsustainable "highs" -- new car, new phone, new PDA, new house, new shot of cocaine. Each gives a short lift, but not a permanent one. Some return us to the prior state of taking-for-granted; others (coke) return us to a lower state. What's needed is activities, objects, and substances that keep us off the unsustainable hedonic treadmill. Lots of little daily boosts that keep us up, without burning through our resources or our brain cells. Maybe it will be a substance, but I doubt it. More likely, a practice, or discipline: meditation, drawing, painting, writing, exercise, snuggling with your sweetie (or your cat). It's all simple stuff. We've been highly conditioned that the answer (a) has to be complicated (b) has to be in the hands of experts and (c) has to cost money.
It's time to get off this treadmill.
Posted by Chris at 06:06 PM | Comments (2)