another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.

Pictures of him as a boy

For leaking classified US government information to the website Wikileaks, on July 30, 2013, Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was convicted of 17 charges, including five counts of espionage and theft. On the heels of this verdict, The New York Times published an article titled "Loner Sought a Refuge, and Ended Up in War". Here, Manning is described as a lifelong outcast. The article further reveals that it was not his crimes that he was being tried for, but his identity:

As prosecutors accused Private Manning of being a self-promoting “anarchist” who was nothing like the tortured man of principle portrayed by his lawyers, supporters around the world celebrated him as a martyr for free speech. But the heated language on both sides tended to overshadow the human story at the center of the case.

The article does the sense-making for us. In its narrative, Manning's online connections--first with Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, then with computer hacker Adrian Lamo--that led to this conviction follow a pattern, and add the apparently unfortunate conclusion to his coherent life's story. However, contrary to what the article says, it is precisely the human story that has been at the center of the case and the center of media coverage from day one: international outlaw, Julian Assange; guilty martyr, Bradley Manning; narcissistic fugitive, Edward Snowden--these are the characters, and they are the story.

a month late about the NRA response to the Newtown massacre

A week after 20 children and six adult staff members were murdered during a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, US, the NRA's Executive VP and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, read a public statement representing the NRA's response. The NRA called for installing armed security at schools, reasoning that banks, courthouses, office buildings, etc., all have armed security. The NRA's statement went on to at least partially attribute the appearance of escalating public violence to video games and movies.

In the wake LaPierre's reading, one line from the statement came to represent the whole of it:

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?

Critics and detractors panned the statement, calling it paranoid and delusional. Politically, it had its strengths and weaknesses. But the takeway statement--that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun--that part is special.

This line is special because it harmonizes the interests of the NRA's individual members with those of gun manufacturers and sellers. See, gun manufacturers and sellers accept bad guys' money as surely as they accept good guys'. In their ideal scenario, everyone is armed. Good guys have a gun; bad guys have a gun. And the industry has the cash.

Meanwhile, the NRA's individual members all imagine they are good guys--good guys armed for the benefit of all the would-be victims out there.

about Søren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or"

This review is incomplete. In fact, this isn't properly a review of Either/Or at all. I struggled to stay interested, and by the latter third of this collection of essays, I was barely even skimming the text.

My edition is abridged, and the editor's preface reasons that passages in the original complete text could (read: should) have been edited out in the first place. After having pushed through a majority of these pages, I can understand the temptation to trim a text in hopes of avoiding the kind of wheel-spinning that can mar an otherwise valuable work.

Now, Either/Or.

Kierkegaard wrote and published Either/Or using pseudonyms. He even fronted the text with an editor's preface that gives a fictional account of the book's contents--various writings roughly divided into an aesthetically-oriented first half, followed by an ethically, duty-oriented second.

The aesthetic portion is a collection of essays largely about artistic appreciation, love, and boredom. It's also largely consumed with melancholy. Kierkegaard's fictional authors discuss real works of art, and focus on the abstract, lending otherworldly qualities to the finer arts. Early on, there is some discussion that reminds me of Plato's forms--things themselves and ideas of things.

The "Shadowgraphs" essay has some of the more interesting content in this half. Here is a striking, although very historically-situated passage:

The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is constantly in search of its object; the searching is the unrest of sorrow and its life. But this searching is a constant fluctuation, and if the outer were at every moment a perfect reflection of the inner, to represent reflective sorrow would require an entire series of pictures and no one picture would require genuine artistic value, since it would not be beautiful but true. We would have to look at the pictures as we do at the second hand of the watch; the works themselves are invisible, but the inner movement constantly expresses itself in the constant change of the outer. But this change cannot be represented in art, yet it is the whole point.

And, soon after, Kierkegaard's fictional author compares the pain of broken engagements to that of a broken marriage; this comparison is especially meaningful coming from Kierkegaard because, prior to Either/Or's publishing, he broke off an engagement and was much scandalized for it publicly, and much tormented by it privately. He reasoned in his journals that he broke the engagement because he did not have faith, supposedly. In Either/Or, he writes:

What must evoke reflective sorrow even more ... is the fact that it is only an engagement that has been broken off. An engagement is a possibility, not something actual, yet just because it is only a possibility, it might seem that the effect of its being broken off would be less, that it is much easier to withstand this blow. And sometimes that may well be true. On the other hand, the fact that it is only a possibility that is destroyed tempts reflection much more to the fore. When something actual is brought to an end, generally the break is far more radical, every nerve is cut asunder and in itself the fracture, regarded as such, remains complete. When a possibility is broken off, the instantaneous pain may not be as great, but then it leaves one or another small ligament whole an unharmed, which becomes a constant source of continued suffering. The destroyed possibility appears transfigured in a higher possibility, while the temptation to conjure up such a new possibility is less when it is something actual that is broken off, because actuality is higher than possibility.

Then the book continues with exercises in art appreciation. The focus on seen and unseen aspects of art continue, as the speaker strives to see real works as higher representations. Obviously, Kierkegaard does not regard the aesthetic as the equivalent of hedonism.

The second half (maybe less than half) of the book focuses on ethical considerations and a sense of duty. I didn't necessarily see these halves as being in direct tension. But my attention started to wane. So much so that I won't continue here. I'll have to revisit this later.

Did you know: O.J. Simpson played for the 49ers, 1978-79

After he was injured in 1977, the Bills traded O.J. Simpson to the San Francisco 49ers for a second-round draft pick. He retired in 1979.

about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

We join a father and son journeying down a desolate but dangerous road cut through postapocalyptic America. They, suffering, were just trying to get to the end. I felt the same, reading this story in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

We're the good guys, the father says. But in time the boy begins to doubt, then grows wholly disbelieving. Through his seared-in allegiance to his son's preservation, the man abandons his capacity to trust, and so loses his humanity.

After figuring this out, the boy sees that, though he is his father's burden, he is the one shouldering the world. His humanity still budding, the boy worries for each damned soul they pass.

Having reached the coast and been turned back around, The Road finally concludes with father-protector dying, and son taking the hand of a stranger; whether this show of desperate hope and resigned trust will be rewarded is unknown.

Cormac McCarthy links hope and trust; and those, with youth. So what does this futuristic tale, published in 2006, say about our fate?

Unlike Cormac McCarthy's one-dimensional dustbin of days, our terrain grows more and more complicated, but also more open, with more people connected and more isolated and stratified at the same time. And here, again, we see that caution and the drive for self-preservation is as indispensable as the capacity for hope and trust. But, moreover, in Cormac McCarthy's world, both persist with us until our dying day. Cynical, pointless doom.

I appreciated that McCarthy's sparse prose reflected the desolate world he created, but I never got into this, and did not enjoy it in any sense.


 

Mother

Clouds tumbled overhead, an ash avalanche, a silent disaster film, while she, the money counter, stationed herself bedside, gazing upon the ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds arranged on the comforter, catching dull the morning light like eyes of dead children arranged before the killer. Her husband made noise in the kitchen: microwave beeping, plates knocking. She knew he hungered always for her fear and submission, but tomorrow she would serve him his death. She paid the hitman tonight.

about nobody

I thought I smelled Grandmother today. This made me feel far away for the first time in awhile. There was winter, now it's summer, and there was no interruption.

something about "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Billed as "The Uncensored Oral History of Punk", Please Kill Me testifies to punk rock's NYC birth in the mid-1970's. The book organizes quotes from a cast of people who were there--participants and witnesses, and these people describe the scene, say who's who, and, of course, talk about the sex and drugs. But noticeably missing in these quotes is elaboration on the rock and roll.

There is no date or period anchoring the end of this telling, but the notable event in the final pages is the death of Johnny Thunders, former guitarist of the New York Dolls and, later, The Heartbreakers. These bands--the Dolls, in particular--dominated the genre's salad days. The Stooges (aka, Iggy and The Stooges) and the New York Dolls are the book's favorites, followed by the Ramones and the mostly derided Sex Pistols. The Dead Boys get minor coverage, too. But the deaths of Sid Vicious, Stiv Bators, and, as noted, Johnny Thunders serve as the conclusion to punk's story--at least in this version, even though Bators and Thunders died 10 years after the core of events described in the book.

If you're really into the music of any three of the above-mentioned bands, then Please Kill Me is sweet, truthy gossip. If you're not, then the quotes and people fast grow petty and irrelevant--the narrators sometimes indulge the "more punk than you" pissing contest that strips punk of its cultural relevance by pretending this raw, resilient music that crackles with energy belongs only to them, those self-important members of their own inertly private country club.

Converge perform "Glacial Pace" at Saint Vitus +1

from opinions rendered in Maryland v. King

Justice Kennedy penned the majority opinion in Maryland v. King, which ruled "... that DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure ..." This means the cops can swab the inside of the cheek of someone who gets arrested, so long as that someone is being detained for a "serious offense". In giving the majority opinion, Kennedy goes on at length praising the role of DNA in identifying people. He points out that, had Timothy McVeigh been swabbed when he was stopped for not having a license plate hours after he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, then the cop could have known it was McVeigh. Or, had one of the 9-11 hijackers been swabbed when he was ticketed for speeding days before the atrocity, the cop would have identified him, too. Of course, nevermind that these identifications would not have prevented anything, and that neither terrorist was being arrested at the time. Kennedy's reasonings are impressively dense. And Justice Scalia calls him out for it.

In the dissent, Scalia writes, "The Court’s assertion that DNA is being taken, not to solve crimes, but to identify those in the State’s custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous." Then he goes on:

... while the Court is correct to note (ante, at 8–9) that there are instances in which we have permitted searches without individualized suspicion, “[i]n none of these cases. . . did we indicate approval of a [search] whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.” Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U. S. 32, 38 (2000).

Just how intrusive is the cotton swab? Maybe that's beside the point, as Scalia notes:

And could the police engage, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, in a “brief and . . . minimal” intrusion into the home of an arrestee—perhaps just peeking around the curtilage abit? See ante, at 26. Obviously not.

And what of the purpose of identifying people? Is identifying someone really so innocent? No, Scalia argues:

At points the Court does appear to use “identifying” in that peculiar sense—claiming, for example, that knowing “an arrestee’s past conduct is essential to an assessment of the danger he poses.” Ante, at 15. If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search. Searching every lawfully stopped car, for example, might turn up information about unsolved crimes the driver had committed, but no one would say that such a search was aimed at “identifying” him ...

But what if the State really is just identifying people without intending to solve crimes for which no probable cause to search exists?

The truth, known to Maryland and increasingly to the reader: this search had nothing to do with establishing King’s identity.
...
DNA testing does not even begin until after arraignment and bail decisions are already made. The samples sit in storage for months, and take weeks to test. When they are tested, they are checked against the Unsolved Crimes Collection—rather than the Convict and Arrestee Collection, which could be used to identify them.The Act forbids the Court’s purpose (identification), but prescribes as its purpose what our suspicionless-search cases forbid (“official investigation into a crime”). Against all of that, it is safe to say that if the Court’s identification theory is not wrong, there is no such thing as error.

So, all that said, what does the majority's errant ruling promise for the future?

The Court disguises the vast (and scary) scope of its holding by promising a limitation it cannot deliver. The Court repeatedly says that DNA testing, and entry into a national DNA registry, will not befall thee and me, dear reader, but only those arrested for “serious offense[s].” Ante, at 28; see also ante, at 1, 9, 14, 17, 22, 23, 24 (repeatedly limiting the analysis to “serious offenses”). I cannot imagine what principle could possibly justify this limitation, and the Court does not attempt to suggest any. If one believes that DNA will “identify” someone arrested for assault, he must believe that it will “identify” someone arrested for a traffic offense. This Court does not base its judgments on senseless distinctions. At the end of the day, logic will out. When there comes before us the taking of DNA from an arrestee for a traffic violation, the Court will predictably (and quite rightly) say, “We can find no significant difference between this case and King.” Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

about "Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France" by Michel Foucault

Abnormal is largely about the concept and perception of the abnormal person--the pervert or rapist or peeping Tom, for example--from the 19th century to present. In this lecture, Foucault begins by saying that, when an individual has power, he often becomes an object of ridicule (i.e., kings were often portrayed as fools by the peasants, at times). Foucault then explains how psychiatric opinions delivered in court conjure the character of a delinquent alongside the accused--a delinquent doppelganger to the author of the crime. So, it follows, the respected expert psychiatrist on the witness stand is also an oaf because he assesses and prescribes moral instruction as if he were a child, and he describes danger as if he himself was irrationally afraid.

Foucault then embarks on an overview of how power works in this discussion, referring to the phenomenon of how plague patients were partitioned off within society to be watched and studied (as opposed to lepers banished from society). But instead of plague victims, it is the abnormal who are watched and studied. The result of this partitioning and watching is the individualization of people--which is not to be confused with exclusion. All this is done for the preservation and productivity of society's healthy individuals, those whose potential is maximized.

Now, Foucault explains that, until the 16th and 17th century, a crime was conceived of as an offense against the sovereign, and punishment for the crime had to be bigger than the crime because it had to supersede the crime. But, later, crime in general was imagined as having a nature, a criminality, which leads to the question, What is the nature of a criminal? In a penal system that favors this question, the criminal's motive must be matched and nullified by the judicial system, and the medical community took it upon themselves to diagnose motives. Psychology supplies motives for motiveless crimes, and otherwise labels criminals as insane, thereby releasing the penal system from its obligation to punish.

A major development in criminology and psychology was the recognition and exploration of the concept of instinct. "Instinct" allowed for a power mechanism--the penal system with its need for knowledge--to engage with knowledge a mechanism--psychiatry and its need for power. The notion of human instinct helps make motiveless crimes intelligible; it also allows for the medical transformation of motiveless acts into pathological acts.

The notion of instinct came to dominate psychiatry, and allowed the field to expand its domain. Psychiatry soon became a form of family intervention; familial relations were pathologized such that antagonistic relations are deemed pathological. After 1850, a political dimension is introduced; much as history became a tool to politicize the past and present, psychiatry came to help distinguish riots from good revolutions by looking at the minds and motives of the leaders of movements. Madness opposed order, opposed family and personal relationships, and opposed stability; it was a characteristic of social immobility. Healthy behaviors and mentalities had to be conventional and voluntary; deviant behaviors and mentalities consisted of automatic and instinctual responses. All conduct was judged along a contimuum of voluntary vs. involuntary, all relative to the norm. Here, psychology grows beyond madness; psychology could now question all behavior, all people.

About the time that the state formalized support of marriage through policy incentives, homes started being built partitioned, with different rooms for each family member, separating families within a single home, separating kids from parents. This distribution of bodies helps dissuade the development of pathological, antagonistic, and/or incestuous relationships between family members. Foucault discusses the prototypes of the abnormal individual, the monster and the masturbator, and explains how the masturbator enabled psychology to become an authority on family, and link sexuality with illness in terms of masturbation or any other realization of the sexual impulse deemed immoral. Psychology's linking of sexuality with instinct opened a field that allows for masturbators and motiveless murderers to exist in the same conceptual space. Here, the sexual instinct is imagined as fragile, capable of becoming distorted and the cause of degeneracy.

Foucault discusses a rape case set in the 1860's that was referred to psychiatry for explanation. The controversial field outlined the offender's physical traits, and linked these to his deficiencies. He was described as having arrested development, rather than an exaggerated instinct or drive; likewise, his morality was arrested, according to the psychiatric experts.

In the early psychiatric conception of criminality, a patient's development goes wrong, and then the person becomes a criminal. But later psychiatry posits that the seeds of criminality are sown in the person's childhood. Psychiatry faced a dilemma when patients became depathologized because the practice no longer had the backing of medicine, and patients were no longer an suffering illness, per say. Psychiatry identified collections of eccentricities and behaviors and called them "conditions" or "syndromes". These collections of traits were previously considered predispositions, and a person could have a predisposition and still be normal (to the extent such a conception existed). But conditions and syndromes came to describe the abnormal, and any physical or mental illness can be associated with any condition or syndrome. Conditions refer to health but are not illness; they are non-health. Conditions are typically a case of arrested (moral) development or regression.

Foucault explains that a condition's causal background is the patient's heredity. In examining a patient's heredity, anything can cause anything. For example, Your uncle was a drunk? That explains your degeneracy today. Similarly--and this is the lecture's main point--a person's use of the sexual instinct for non-reproductive purposes, a person's having sex or masturbating for pleasure, is thought to point to a condition. This diagnosis is moralizing cloaked in medicine. Degeneracy grew increasingly medicalized. Furthermore, if conditions are a result of heredity, then the idea of finding a cure means nothing in psychiatry. So, this reveals that the field is not so much about the health of the patient, but rather about the protection of society from the effects of degeneracy. The heredity-based form of racism that sprang up at the end of the 19th century and reached its nadir with Nazism stems from psychiatry's social defense aspect.

This is a rich, winding lecture that recalls and elaborates on many of Foucault's major themes. Thoroughly enjoyable read.

how it's nothing, really

If this article--Mother Jones' Access Hollywood: How Jeffrey Katzenberg Became the Democrats' Kingmaker--is like the hundreds of other such articles before it, then Jeffrey Katzenberg is a name you'll maybe hear two or three more times and then never again. Not because he doesn't have some influence, but because he only has some influence.

Our Lady

With seven hollow vibrations, Our Lady of Sorrows' bell sank into the still-salty street and patched grass yards. I crossed into the big lot, passed the gym and Big Lots, then pulled the door. After grabbing a box each of sandwich and freezer bags--four dollars for both--and waiting the requisite two minutes in line, my turn. The young cashier, a girl no more than 17, here working at Family Dollar, rang me up, taking a five and exact change to cover the $4.36. Hands me my change, then speaks,

Thanks for putting the money in my hand. A lot of people just throw it on the counter.

That's how the big shots do.

She comes around and recollects a bunch of mops for sale by the door. Says,

Even though my hand be right here, she adds.

She returns to the register. The next has already lined up behind me.

Thank you.

Have a good night, I hear, pushing back into the big lot.

Concrete sinks beneath me. Cool air lends the hush.

about Baz Luhrmann's film, "The Great Gatsby"

Seated in the theater tipping back Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby", you're hyperaware that what you're seeing is a theatrical production: super-sized CGI-powered stage props and back drops. This isn't a period piece depicting the Jazz Age so much as it is an indulgence of the Jazz Age of our imaginations. And, in a way, this is perfect; this is an ode to Gatsby, a man who has built his own life with stage sets born of his imagination.

The Great Gatsby--the movie and the man--is a big show.

But the film pays a cost here because The Great Gatsby the novel is also a story--a story with moments of candid intimacy, bared feelings, and things revealed. So the problem is, when those genuine moments come, the film can't stop putting on a show.

This film can't be the book. Maybe it didn't have to. Too bad it tried.


Notes:

• Even with this flaw (and it's not the only big flaw), I enjoyed the film a great deal.

• Going in, I estimated Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire should have switched roles; I traditionally think of DiCaprio as having an edge and Maguire as the more vulnerable and charming. But I was very wrong: DiCaprio is nearly flawless--everyone is.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

RIP Jeff Hanneman (1964-2013)

Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman died last week. Helped invent thrash, wrote some of the best songs in that genre, and played swooping, crazy-barbed solos.

about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

The sleeve and press around Dry calls it a memoir, but the book reads more like fiction. Burroughs aptly boosts his addiction-oriented narrative with wit and crisp prose. Result, the pages turn quickly.

In first person, Burroughs opens the tale fessing up to the professional lapses that opened the door to rehab. But his stay there is given short treatment--too short, because much of the remaining three-fifths of the memoir dote on high-schoolish accounts of doomed and/or ambiguous relationships with other men. Nevertheless, Dry is a fun, fast read, thanks to Burrough's style and real-gay charm.

about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.

about "The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" by RJ Smith

Through the ups and downs, James Brown commanded an audience. RJ Smith depicts this singular artist's flight out of poverty on the heels of Little Richard, his celebrity-identity bridging the civil rights movement and beyond, and his persistent stumble through the late-stage hard times.

Brown was born, barely, into extreme poverty, and grew up motherless, at the mercy of a hardscrabble father. His affinity for music and singing and his seemingly innate start quality got him followers and fellow musicians from early on. During the first half of his career, James Brown busted ass, working musicians into the tightest band alive, and wielding that band as his own, personal instrument. Year-round, he left it all on the stage.

For different, complicated reasons, some black celebrities' identities are tied to the politics of America's larger black community. Brown's did, but he was wildly inconsistent, veering from black power advocate to Nixon-endorsing spokesman. Brown was mixed up and he was his own man--a complicated soul who gave himself to the public.

Inexplicably--almost--after Brown turned 50 years old, he found himself with money problems, then, after more than half a lifetime working hard and sober, Brown started using PCP. Trouble chased him the rest of his life. Brown died in 2006, still troubled, still a star.


Note: In an afterword, RJ Smith reveals the small gang of thieves most responsible for Brown's financial ruin.