Motivated

About an article indirectly about authors and their texts

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a sort-of interesting article titled "The Unabomber's Pen Pal" that is about a college professor trying to teach the anti-technology ideas espoused by Ted Kaczynski among others (but especially by him). This professor seeks to remove from the remote Montana cabin and the remote mind of its terrorist author the ideas captured in Kaczynski's manifesto and resituate them in the academy. Apparently it often turns out that exploring the ideas on their own merit takes a backseat to discussing the practicality and ethics of doing so.

Within contemporary literary theory, can the text be removed from its author? How did the author get "into" the text in the first place?

And should he be removed? Is this a special kind of work? A unique case?

Kaczynski lived his ideology and practiced his philosophy. In one sense, by removing the author from the text, the professor is attempting to protect the text, give it viability in the marketplace of ideas. But at the same time, without its author, the text is deprived of the life Kaczynski lived in its manifestation--the life it advocates for, the revolution it endorses: all that is locked away, isolated, imprisoned so as not to threaten its academic life.

To wit, Kaczynski is first locked away so as not to threaten society; then he is locked away a second time so as not to threaten his own ideas. Indeed, the text is freed the moment its author is imprisoned.

"Kaczynski" is now an abstraction of the man who attacked society by sending bombs through the mail while hidden in a remote Montana cabin. When the name is attributed to the text, "Kaczynski" appears in faded print in its margins, and can be found scratched in between the lines, where it adds or invokes a certain character in the work. This character says, Yes, these words are dangerous, these words are of consequence to you and to the establishment. These are fighting words.

This is not to say you can't or shouldn't remove the author from his text (in a sense I'm all for it). It's just that, given the current practice of (critical) literary theory, if you try, you might expect the text to change. After all, the fact that the professor consciously has to remove the author, and that the Chronicle wrote about his trying to do so, shows current theory's unrelenting emphasis and reliance on the author function.

About Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 by Michel Foucault

Foucault lectured at the Collège de France for several semesters. This opportunity allowed him to continue and share his research, his hypotheses and conclusions. In this lecture series, Foucault traces the origin and evolution of the modern concept of government and the assemblage of techniques, collectively called security, it uses in managing the population. Foucault shows that the question of how the sovereign should rule the territory and its inhabitants became a question of what technique of leadership would do given the new phenomenon called "population.

I first read this in March 2012 but am returning to it now to take notes while I read. This edition (and others in the series) is awesome because the editors include valuable additions of their own, Foucault's notes, and material from the Collège.

About the the film "Aguirre: The Wrath of God"

We pick up as Pizarro leads his Spanish conquistadors, their attachés and family, holy men, and slaves out of the Andes into the Amazon in search of cities of gold. When the jungle gets too rough, the respected leader sends a detachment ahead. Second-in-command of that group is the ferociously intense Lope de Aguirre, who quickly takes over when obstacles mount. Pushing into a land that's already hostile and serene, beautiful and unforgiving, Aguirre's disturbed mannerisms and incommunicable disposition renders the journey all the more oppressive and surreal; Aguirre, reanimated through actor Klaus Kinski, lopes and lunges, all fragmented postures and twisted body, never moving in a straight line, physically impending on his surroundings from round about.

Kinski, who was actually mad by most accounts, really is fascinating to watch. This film is an artistic success and widely considered one of the best ever, with lots of credit going to director Werner Herzog. The opening scenes of the expedition sneaking through the Andes are some of the most awesome I've seen on film. The end is pretty stunning, too.

About the jobs report

For a couple years now, every month has opened news-wise with reaction to the so-called "jobs report" or "jobs numbers", which indicate whether employment has eeked up, down, or stayed the same. This month's coverage includes the very predictable article "Bleak jobs report spells trouble for Obama re-election" via Reuters. Sure, most of the jobs report-related news refers to its impact on the election (as opposed to its impact on common welfare or anything else). No surprise there--we're going for the story.

More interestingly, the jobs report is a ritual now. For the press and its readers, the numbers stir the election season waters. But that is what you read on the surface. Systematically speaking, the the report is more importantly a function of security. It shows the Labor Department keeping tabs on employment--the extent to which the time of the populace is productively occupied with wealth generation; and through the report we live a shared experience, relating to each other on economic terms, as subjects of the economy, as economic constructs built into the economy--that complicated system of freedom and security-minded, neoliberal artificial market constructions.

Fluctuations are almost reassuring in this sense. The reporter asks, What will the Fed do? The economist answers, What can the Fed do?

Nobody does anything without first consulting the overall trend in the numbers. Has it been going down for six months? or up for six months? This discussion--and here the other mechanisms of security kick in--feeds an even larger discourse on the economy, composes and comprises its truths, truths which are repeated, amplified, and re-enforced via media in the minds of the economic subject. Too much bad news and the economic subject becomes electoral subject and modifies the leadership; and/or leadership modifies rates or removes barriers to commerce or flushes sectors with cash to stimulate commerce; tariffs are raised or lowered; immigration is encouraged or denied and on and on. Fluctuation and its many counter and co-fluctuations are part of a healthy, secured system. After all, there will always be something. What matters to the economic technocrat is not the something but how the various mechanisms of security relate within the "reality" of an economy prone to fluctuate.

(The real mother this time though is Europe, so I hear. And therein lies the way out.)

About blurring the line between establishment and anti-establishment

The CBS News article "In Texas, a rising conservative star takes on the establishment" covers the Congressional primary race between two poll-leading conservative candidates in Texas: David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz. The article calls Cruz the anti-establishment candidate. Compared to Dewhurst, most people would be. But Cruz, according to the article,

has racked up considerable support from high-profile conservatives in his bid for the Republican nomination. Last Thursday, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave Cruz his backing, citing what he called his "wow factor." Earlier this month, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin endorsed Cruz, as has Texas Rep. Ron Paul, S.C. Sen. Jim DeMint, and Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. In the Washington Post, George Will called him "a candidate as good as it gets".

The son of Cuban refugees, Cruz attended Princeton, Harvard Law School, and then clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

If George Will gives him the thumbs up, he's establishment. If he also attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, clerked for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, and has the support of two (former) Presidential candidates, then the label "anti-establishment" really doesn't fit.

on the Stairway to Heaven

Half-day

On half-days in grade school, right after the first bell we'd file out of school into church for the first of a two-part mass. After noon we'd return, incense swelling, to witness the priest recover the alter. This brief reprisal would end with a spirited hymn sung with all the joy of children eager to start the long weekend early. It was during the singing of one of these hymns I remember first feeling the rush, like adrenaline, like possibility, like freedom, raw and holy, pushing over the precipice of the sky, promising to obliterate us all.

Siri and iPhone 4S (or whatever it is) commercial

See the two commercials for the iPhone 4S: one with Samuel L. Jackson and the other with a "Zooey Deschanel". Note the repartee between actor and phone. What are they selling?

Most immediately, they are selling Command. Command requires a commander, someone who controls, who navigates, who regulates; in this case, the phone owner. Command also requires the attention of another, someone willing to take as her will the will of the commander; she is the audience--in this case, the phone.

But what need does Command satisfy? What common desire are the marketers exploiting?

We're buying the license to indulge our own personality. To indulge, to express the self to the machine for the benefit of the self. Notice how the characters run a commentary, as if entertaining the phone; but really they are entertaining themselves.

When we narrate for and "interact" with Siri, we can act obnoxious or cute, voice whatever witticism, drivel, passing thought and fancy that would otherwise shrivel and die as things do when they are unfit for survival. But now such behavior is legitimized because now you have a (captive) audience, which, in your mind, makes you a star, a sovereign without territory, holding court with your first and only servant.

But that is the illusion. What is the actual effect?

Man, obliterated again and again by technologies since the industrialized age, seeks yet again to actualize himself through more technology, this time through the validation that comes with getting recognized by the machine--the machine that consumes him.

He doesn't speak to a person through the phone; he speaks to the phone, and the phone answers him. But it answers not the way a patient parent answers her insufferable child. Rather, he merely hears the mechanized echo of his own voice and mistakes it for contact. And rather than grow up, he grows even more dependent until he can't function without it. He is obliterated in his discourse with the machine that tolerates him, for, in this discourse, no one is learning about him, growing to like to him (or hate him), getting used to him, making him more compassionate or better or more patient--indeed, probably the opposite is true. He regresses into infancy.

But now he is old.

Notes:

• I don't know who a "Zooey Deschanel" is but judging by an images search it's a professional face maker.

started reading The Bible

Will try to read this in chunks between other books. I won't read it in one pass.

My first impression is a rhetorical one: the Old Testament's extensive family tree-building leads readers to assume the text's credibility as a historical document. Second, I don't understand Jacob's characterization. My sense is that I'm supposed to like him but he's not a good person as far as I can tell. God favors some people, it says, and Jacob is one of those people. Otherwise, the Old Testament is mostly good so far.

I doubt I'll pick it up again for a while, though. I guess ultimately I'm less interested in the Bible's content than I am in the discourse community around it.

Since I put it down I've read a lot of articles, both journalistic and academic, on a range of subjects. No need to note any in particular.

a cat

In The New Yorker piece, "“Death of a Salesman”: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Mediocrity", staff writer/blogger Giles Harvey says Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" isn't so hot. True, Miller is no Shakespeare, but rather than defend either Miller or Harvey, I'll just point out one thing in his critique.

Harvey opens with a story about criticism he received as a creative writing student:

I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.” ...

What our teacher was complaining about, it now seems obvious, was the tendency of students to cloak our rather banal thoughts and impressions in a poetical gauze—our tendency, after reading Keats, say, to fill our poems with bowers and nightingales and long, slow vowels.

Then begins Harvey's critique, which argues that the conflicts and issues in Miller's classic are not conveyed with enough subtlety, that "In “Salesman” there is always a straight line leading from a harrowing past event to a present neurosis or failure." Moreover, "Characters are explained, exposed, insisted upon; but Miller rarely allows them to stray into the kind of tantalizing opacity and incoherence that makes the people in, say, Chekhov or Shakespeare seem so real." In other words, Miller failed to cloak his banal thoughts in a poetical gaze.

Note:

• My criticizing the author's apparent inconsistency might not be spot-on, but his criticism misses (or ignores) some big targets, too.
• Harvey had just seen Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman.

About the film "Affliction"

When George Clooney does a film, his character is George Clooney. Same for Pacino, DeNiro (now), and so many others. But Nick Nolte transforms himself, really acts the part, and no matter what people generally think of his acting, he's underrated. The proof is here in his 1997 portrayal of a back town New Hampshire policeman named Wade Whitehouse. Vulnerable, teetering, Wade shuffles around town, pivoting those broad shoulders, wagging his head, fidgeting like an insecure teenager. Effectively, that's what he is; although grown, Wade constantly redefines himself through the memories of an abused child trapped near the booze-fueled anger of his stricken father, monstrously played by James Coburn, a man consuming whiskey, consumed with self-hatred and destructive conceptions of masculinity.

In the margin of the film is Willem Dafoe as Wade's resigned but more successful brother, Rolfe. Rolfe seems to have made peace with his childhood. Or maybe he just shut down emotionally to some degree. Having grown up on eggshells, he describes himself as having been a careful child, and, now, a careful adult. This film is so rich, and well punctuated throughout with Rolfe's voice-overs; the following two passages are high-water marks. The first, when Wade crosses over from desperate to lost:

You will say that I should have known terrible things were about to happen. You will say that I was responsible. But even so, what could I have done by then? Wade lived on the edge of his emotions. He was always first to receive the brunt of our father's anger. He had no perspective to retreat to, even in a crisis.

and, at the end:

Facts do not make history. Our stories, Wade's and mine, describe the lives of the boys and men for thousands of years: boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth, men whose best hope for connection with other human beings lay in detachment, as if life were over. It's how we keep from destroying in turn our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us; how we absent ourselves from the tradition of male violence; how we decline the seduction of revenge.

To be divine

Swinging

It was here it ended. In a humble city park with a prefab playground and paint chipped picnic tables--a slice of Bermuda grass supposing to make a bunch of houses a community. My wife found the first clue a year prior and had by then in-person seen me here with Liz three times. Liz and I met at work; she was initially drawn, she says, by the curious pairing of my young, kind face with my old man's ways, me being 44. Her telling me so was enough for me. Light flirting, then a few lunch dates, then a walk in the park followed by other walks in the park. After a while I held her hand. We walked, slowing and stopping here and there as if oaks and a few pines strewn amid scrub trees and dry weeds were something to look at. We also ran errands together. Sometimes we just drove. We went to hotels. We even arranged to meet in the evening five times. Five, despite my being a dedicated homebody, despite my sensing how the absence of your mate makes rubber of your skin and demolishes a home save for its shadows and corners. This sense drove my wife who drove her Prius to my job and then to the park, pulling up to the curb behind the scrub trees lining the man-made runoff creek where water moved ambivalently to its grave. It was here it ended, with my wife waving to Liz and me from the swing set.

Francois Hollande

In covering Francois Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, American and British mainstream media discussed market reaction. The headlines were different variations of Markets to Drop on Fears of European Elections. What the market does, how it reacts, is now one of the main angles for any news item. Investment is the domain of the wealthy, and these headlines emphasize their interests and opinions. From now on, who you elect, how you regulate, what you earn, what you pay, when and where you war--everything you do should satisfy those interests.

Something about "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq

This novella begs comparison to Camus' The Stranger. But the 21st century is a subject in Whatever. Contrary to reviewer consensus, I imagine the story making a temporal statement more so than a generational one. In this reading, the hypothesis that unfolds is that Camus' mid-20th century model French Existentialist would today be a Nihilist, his banner of authenticity battered, beaten to shreds by the perceived ceaseless normalization of personalities and scripting of roles, the sweeping away of the work-life balance, the abandonment of intellectuality in favor of "being informed," and the overall digitizing of experience and of perspective.*

Whereas Camus' man suffered the conditions of Absurdity and Freedom and the indifference of the Universe, Houellebecq's suffers needlessness, minor inconvenience, and isolation (that is self-imposed to a degree). Here, the main character, almost subconsciously, and unconsciously, articulates in writing the need for human connection:

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance...It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, provided he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolute inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Camus' The Stranger is, to my mind, a work of literature, then a work of philosophy. Houellebecq's Whatever is literature, and secondly a work of social or cultural commentary. This was thoroughly enjoyable.

Notes:

• * My describing those trends doesn't quite capture the totality (or maybe lack of totality) of the Modern that Houellebecq cynically evokes.

• I felt considerable empathy reading this book.

• The prose isn't elegant—not in the traditional sense, anyway, but this is nice:

  Doubtless I have some vague existence today in a doctoral dissertation, alongside other real-life cases. The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding, its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.

Copy, and Paste

THE GREAT HUNT
 -by Carl Sandburg

I CANNOT tell you now;
  When the wind's drive and whirl
  Blow me along no longer,
  And the wind's a whisper at last--
  Maybe I'll tell you then--
                    some other time.

When the rose's flash to the sunset
  Reels to the rack and the twist,
  And the rose is a red bygone,
  When the face I love is going
  And the gate to the end shall clang,
  And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"--
     Maybe I'll tell you then--
                    some other time.

I never knew any more beautiful than you:
  I have hunted you under my thoughts,
  I have broken down under the wind
  And into the roses looking for you.
  I shall never find any
      greater than you.

How it was

I was never closer to him than during those few weeks, weeks that exploded like moments, when the language he had heard since birth promised to realize from his lips into our world as humidity will from stirred up air some dark April nights in North Texas. Those days he'd watch how my mouth formed words, inch his fat little hand to my lips, (so close right then), him believing it was just a matter of getting the mechanics right, making the jaw and teeth and tongue do their work. But communicating was more difficult than that, obviously, and he would learn that lesson most sincerely for having known me.

About losing heroes

According to a piece of crap Forbes article,

If Hulk’s successful turnaround continues, Gitter says Marvel “will spin him off to a stand-alone program next year,” supported by a big budget franchise movie in 2015. The entertainment studio is also exploring ways to promote Hulk as a “corporate icon,” similar to MetLife’s usage of Peanuts’ Snoopy, where The Hulk’s image conveys a message about channeling strength to overcome workplace challenges.

Great.