about a couple I saw trying to cross the street

The young couple paused at the sunny street corner where three cars had reached a four-way stop. The car ahead of them moved first, followed by the car on the right turning left, crossing their path. The man watched the cars move, one by one, without turning his head, fearing that to look and acknowledge the driver would signal his yielding. Meanwhile, two more cars cued up at the intersection. He feared that the responsible caution he thought he was demonstrating for his date now seemed like slow-witted timidity. The sun pumped overhead and focused its energy on him, squeezing perspiration from his brow, his armpits, from his back. Was I supposed to have stepped off the curb and challenge the cars? 

She stepped off the curb, offered back her hand and a wink, her eyes a squint in the UV light. A haughty little sigh slipped from his dry mouth—the last little gasp from his car-crushed lungs—then he took her hand, gratefully, and wished he would never have to let go.

 

about the Crossfire

This car is enjoyable; it looks decent and handles nicely. But it takes a certain sense of humor to fully enjoy it. If you drive this car thinking, Here comes the badass, you are a moron. If you want that kind of status, you need a Porsche--you need at least a Porsche. The Crossfire is a Chrysler and is sort of a Mercedes but the thing is plopped into the shape of a Porsche. It ends up being ... well, a Crossfire. And good thing. Enjoy it!

something about Michel Foucault, "The Government of Self and Others"

These lectures, delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982 and 1983, meditate on the concept of truth-telling known as parresia. The bulk of these lectures have Foucault tracing the use, exercise, and implications of parresia through ancient Greek texts.

Foucault starts, however, in the Enlightenment.

What is Enlightenment? Kant asked, and Foucault restates the question: What is this present?* Foucault finds here not only the beginning of contemporary philosophy but the seed of his own brand of inquiry: a discursive practice of philosophy that collides with its own present reality. The speaker--first, Kant, now, Foucault--is no longer speaking as a member of a philosophical tradition or community, but as a part of the present. And, ever since, philosophy has continued questioning its own present reality.

In his reflections on the Enlightenment, Kant speculated that the human race was making progress. He figured that popular support abroad for the ideals propelling the French Revolution symbolized this progress. Man was leaving an era in which he was unwilling to use his reason. Now, he would reason; and, once free to exercise his reason, he could be obedient. More freedom of thought, more obedience. And this obedience requires a kind of self-governance that Foucault interrogates in much of his work.

After a brief visit with the Enlightenment, Foucault starts to dwell in the ancient texts, starting with the myth of Ion and rounding the final corner with Plato's Phaedrus. In these stories he identifies the roles and implications of courage, politics, rhetoric, and philsosophy in the practice and concept of truth-telling known as parresia.

To my mind, this was so far the least compelling of these newly published Foucault lectures. But my mind is somewhere else now, maybe.

Notes:
* Prior to the Enlightenment, people spoke of the present in terms of periods of prosperity or decadence.

Lady Gaga's Little Monsters

The fantasy Lady Gaga sells her fans is one of homogeneous fame ("You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!”). Their real life, which actually is authentic, is replaced by an inauthentic fantasy. Lady Gaga offers her Little Monsters only the denial of self-authorship.

Serving the artist's commercial interest, these fans find comfort, support, and acceptance when together they assume the label Little Monsters. They believe that their self-identification as freaks and outsiders embraces their outsider status, the counterpoint to a mainstream composed of their more popular, better looking peers. But rather than creating a social alternative, they have simply recreated an in-group within the larger mainstream which inadvertently pushes new fashions, concepts of coolness, and other cornerstones of capitalism. In doing so they are even more integral to the system they feel alienated from. They welcome and modify trends, furthering the cycle of need and acceptance.