A Dream That I Had After Seeing Star Trek: The Movie

In this scene, young James Kirk is fighting, wenching, and drinking his way across Iowa, when suddenly…

OLD GUY WHO GETS THE BRAIN LEECHES LATER: We need you to be a starship trooper! Your standardized test scores are way off the charts!

JAMES KIRK: I don’t remember taking any standardized tests!

OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Of course not! You were totally drunk! But your noble, starship trooper blood sort of took them for you when you were passed out, thus proving to millions of teenagers — once again — that if they don’t perform well on the SATs, they should kill themselves!

JAMES KIRK: Are you saying that I have mitochondria in my blood, like Anakin and the annoying, nerdy kid from A Wrinkle in Time?

OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Probably!

JAMES KIRK: Well, that sounds kinda derivative, but…Wait a second, if I become a starship trooper, am I going to have to take that test designed by Spock? It’s totally unbeatable.

O.G. / B.L.: Don’t worry, you’ll kick that test’s ass!

JIMSTER: How?

O.G. / B.L.: By cheating.

JIM-BOB: Does that mean I cheated on the earlier standardized tests, too? Because cheating against Spock seems like a normal thing for a hot-blooded kid from Iowa to do. That Spock! He’s so crazy! The token woman/black person wants to have his baby! But on the other hand, cheating on these standardized tests from my mysterious past would pretty much just make me a cheater, which is sort of lame.

O.G. / B.L.: So let’s just assume that you only cheated when it was awesome to do so. Oh God! The brain leeches! I can feel them attaching themselves!

In Which Our Hero Resolves The Question of Nature vs. Nurture

(x-posted to The Valve, of course)

Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins.
–Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers

Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read. I say this because, unlike traditional works of historicist criticism, Breeding never makes an overt argument about how modern readers should feel about its subject, the nature vs. nurture debates of the 18th Century. It risks seeming purposeless in order to pit Steven Pinker, a contemporary researcher and author on matters of cognition and evolution, against William Godwin, a pedagogue and Romantic who died in 1836. This fundamental comparison seems to be more an effect of the text than something Davidson consciously intended; she spells out her intentions in the Introduction, citing W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes as inspirations for a text that seeks only to explore the “grid” of an issue and to present its nuances in a tolerant, dispassionate fashion.

In so doing, however, the text is bound to leave us mildly disappointed. It is not that it lacks erudition or insight; in fact, as the great diversity of responses published on the Valve indicates, its plentiful supply of both encourages readers to enter this debate as one might a house preserved from that time, lingering over those artifacts that they, for their own reasons, find most compelling. But I think that, even despite ourselves, we come to a book like Breeding in the hopes that we might end up a little closer to answering those same raw and troubling questions that inspired Locke and Rousseau. That remains, in this case, the road not taken. Still, Davidson’s book suggests, if only by what it chooses to include, some important ways of cutting the Gordian knot of nature and nurture.

***

Davidson claims that the uncertainty produced by the tension between nature and nurture is morally ideal. She writes in the conclusion to the book that “a hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation, a hard-core advocacy of nurture” are both likely to make us, in Godwin’s words, “the helpless victims of a blind and remorseless destiny” (205). The real problem with having a destiny of this kind is that it enables us to be summed up by the controlling forces of society: if society knows exactly who we are, either because of our inborn nature or because of how it has formed us, than it can legitimately claim the right to act on that knowledge, effectively depriving us of our freedom. To this end, Davidson revisits not only the intertwined histories of racism and eugenics, but also quotes Mary Midgley on the necessary limits of nurture: “If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it” (7).

Over the course of the book, Davidson presents Godwin as a zealous pedagogue who started out believing entirely in “nurture,” but who eventually had to confront the limits of his own theories:

Yet Political Justice’s uncompromising position on the natural equality of men would be modified by Godwin in subsequent editions of the book, a retraction that speaks to Godwin’s intellectual honesty in the face of his experience as an educator of real children (as opposed to a pure theorist of education). (174)

Davidson continues, after quoting Godwin at length:

The irony is that Godwin should have been so perfectly positioned to see and to articulate the workings of hereditary causes in spite of–because of?–his early adherence to an extreme Helvetian position. In the end, he argues for balance [...] Man “brings a certain character into the world with him,” but not “an immutable character,” although elsewhere in the same collection an older position resurfaces.” (178)

Steven Pinker, by contrast, is the modern academic researcher who never exposes himself to the rough winds of doubt, and who is therefore guilty of resorting to “what seems like intellectual bullying” (40) in support of a heavily deterministic, evolutionary interpretation of human nature and culture, one that even “many of his professional peers are inclined to question” (39). Pinker epitomizes the “hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation” that ultimately puts our personal freedoms in danger.

This is, by now, familiar territory for scholarship in the humanities, as both John Holbo and Miriam Burstein have pointed out. Davidson presents herself as a moderate, championing an ongoing process of inquiry as well as the habit of wary scepticism that sustains it. (Pinker, by contrast, calls himself a moderate but is no such thing.) Such an attitude, her text promises, is both a means of potentially making ourselves better than we currently are, and an antidote to dangerous political enthusiasms.

I hope that I will not give offense by describing such an approach, with its focus on self-improvement and gradualism, as comfortably bourgeois, in the same sense in which we might usefully apply the term to both Barthes and Sebald. (After all, Sebald, in the indictment of a very poor meal that Davidson quotes, is not only preparing the way for his description of starving refugee children; he is also railing against frozen seafood and mass-produced tartar sauce.) In writing about our determination to be “better than we once were” (201, quoting John Passmore), Davidson calls New Year’s resolutions to mind, as well our desire to exercise more, to criticize the action rather than the person, to take piano lessons, and to finally itemize our household expenses. (In the context, one wants to ask: do not even the publicans the same?) It is closer than necessary to the slippery pseudo-critiques of American society in Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics, many of which reduce down to new versions of old self-help truisms. Politically, it is once again the French Revolution as seen from the perspective of English aristocrats who felt the Terror, and the Napoleonic threat, rather more keenly than the horrors of monarchy or empire.

At the same time, Davidson’s book is potentially much better than its excessively determined beginning and end. In her illuminating discussions of Shakespeare, Defoe, Rousseau, and others, she paves the way for a transformation of the debate over nature and nurture into a conversation about the role of art and imagination in the constitution of the individual, and the importance of defending an imaginative, singular Gestalt against the totalizing claims of reason. Davidson spends considerable time on the popular belief that what women imagined during conception and pregnancy influenced the appearance and nature of the child. She mentions twice that women could bear a child who resembled their husband if they pictured the husband while committing adultery. This led to the unintentionally hilarious theory that “resemblance might be brought about because the mother, lying her lover’s arms, feared discovery by her real husband” (23) and therefore practiced a kind of exculpatory visualization exercise.

This seems like a fairly obvious case of reversal, especially considering how that paradigm has evolved up to the present: the real fear is not that the woman will be thinking of her husband while making it with the matador, but rather that she will be thinking of another man while having sex with her husband. Out of this comes all the scenes in modern comedies and soap operas where a lover shouts out the wrong name in the heat of passion, or somebody confesses to “Thinking of you / in the final throes,” as Amy Winehouse puts it. What is terrifying is that the sexual act, which is supposed to produce a merging of subjectivities, cannot banish the stubbornly personal and solitary nature of the imagination. Furthermore, it is the imagination that makes sense of the present through reference to the past, literally putting its “stamp” on an individual’s perceptions in the same way that the parent’s visage stamps the child. The concept of the association of ideas, which was so central to both Locke and Godwin, leads us to analyze the synthetic processes at work in such phenomena as dreams — it leads us, in other words, toward a Freudian understanding of individuality.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we see imagination and reason divided along gendered lines, with the personal accidents of the feminine imagination always figured as a threat to or disfigurement of the perfect, rational male mind, and the correspondingly perfect body. It is especially noteworthy that desire and trauma, which so heavily determine the gap between ourselves and others, are always the points of reference for inherited characteristics. In addition to the anxieties about adultery, “a desire for strawberries might produce a strawberry birthmark” (21), and “the sight of a mutilated beggar [might produce] a child with missing limbs.” The list of traumas expands to include a child whose ear bears the mark of her father’s dueling injury, and a lamb with wool affected by its mother’s once-broken leg.

What may appear to be unscientific fairy stories touch unexpectedly on truths: children are very much subject to the traumas their parents have experienced, both as individual people and as a couple, and they are also subject to the fantasies, superstitions, and other constructs upon which the adults nearest to them depend. This remains a source of great anxiety, as we see in a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, about the suffocating hold of a governess’s imagination over her two charges. On a larger scale, in both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, we see Dostoevsky driven to distraction by the persistence of superstitions and cults that almost sanction insanity, and which are passed down from one generation to the next. But mixed in with this reasonable complaint, one senses, in this contempt for the impressionable and disordered female mind, an intolerant attitude towards the contingent elements in sensibility and subjective perceptions, because these contingencies produce heterogeneous, ungovernable subjects.

It is unfortunate that a book that deals so freely with the “erotic investments” of Rousseau and the sexual anxieties of Swift, Godwin, Malthus and others should dismiss Freud in a single paragraph:

Rousseau’s discussion would find a famous sequel in Freud’s contention “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” But all such arguments hinge on a foundational act of self-deception or self-contradiction in which the writer only pretends to abnegate a culture on which he depends, however much he may deplore it. (120)

This reading of Rousseau and Civilization and Its Discontents reduces all people to helplessness in the face of whatever happens to be their inherited culture and circumstances. It is anti-literary and perhaps even anti-intellectual in its implications. It is difficult to see why Rousseau’s noble savage should be denied the tolerant attitude Davidson adopts towards Jonathan Swift’s fantastical backdrops for social criticism. The very act of going back to the eighteenth century, and imagining oneself to be observing the impact of dealing with unruly children on William Godwin, is an enabling fiction for historical scholarship. Furthermore, any act of repentance is necessarily an act of self-contradiction, which is why Friedrich Nietzsche opposed such attitudes on logical grounds — to strive for perfection, as Davidson wishes us to do, is to stand in contradiction to one’s own history and past choices. Rousseau and Freud are neither more nor less “counterfactual” than she herself wishes to be.

Rather than dismissing a “return to the state of Nature” as a mere impossibility, it seems to me that we can usefully read Rousseau as advocating encounters with Nature in a manner that must, now as then, be deliberately arranged. If we want to have an experience of wildness, we have to arrange time off from work, and we usually have to drive or fly quite a distance, almost as though there were indeed a “deficiency [of Nature's reach or presence] that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature” (115, quoting Derrida). Derrida’s attempts to “disprove” the loss of the natural environment lead to what is, I would argue, a very serious misreading of Rousseau’s passage on men “accustomed from childhood to the inclemencies of the weather, and the rigor of the seasons, hardened to fatigue, and forced to defend naked and unarmed their life and their Prey [...] [who thereby] develop a robust and almost unalterable temperament” that their children come to share. Davidson describes this as the judicious strengthening of “a constitution or temperament [...] by culture” (117), which is simply too reductive. If it is part of one’s culture to consume large amounts of green tea, it is nonetheless not the culture that actually reduces the propensity of one’s cells to form cancerous tumors. It is still the compounds in the tea. I say this because of the inclination to discredit everything Rousseau is saying about Nature by linking it to matters of preference and habit that apply equally to other ideologies, as though the content of the encounter itself was therefore rendered irrelevant.

If we think of Freud and Rousseau as proposing encounters of a certain salutary kind — with the traumatic past and with the bracing impersonality and grandeur of Nature, respectively — then it is not so hard to see them as akin to us in their pursuit of perfection, or rather, to see their stamp upon our own endeavors. In all cases it falls to the individual to bring into harmony that which is contradictory and unresolved in her own experience: the country and the city, the past and the present, theory and practice. We do not know what combination of bitter experience and inbred melancholy produces a Swift, but both are encompassed and transcended by the creative triumph of his work, which he leaves behind as his legacy. (Nor do we know the proportions of myopia and gentleness in the visions of Monet.) Because we have Swift, and Sylvia Plath, and the Sex Pistols, and de Sade, and the rest, we can say, like Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son, “All these…weirdos, and me…getting a little better every day. I had never known…I had never imagined even for a heartbeat that…there might be a place in the world for people like us.” But the search for that place, or rather the heterotopia of many such places, still puts us violently at odds with the general drift of the society, still strands us in the hope that such personal visions, sealed up inside of art, can be awoken into a real and common life.

Good Paulina, lead us from hence,
Where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part
Performed in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissevered. Hastily lead away.
–William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

I Guess White Boys Feel It More

(x-posted to the lovely PopMatters)

I’ve done a bad bad thing
Cut my brother in half
–Little Dewey Cox in Walk Hard

The new millenium has been kind to biopics of musicians. We have, most of us, seen the blockbusters, including Walk The Line, Ray, and Notorious, and these have been accompanied by more minor films like Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Cadillac Records, and Jenna Maroney’s unforgettable Sing Them Blues, White Girl: The Jackie Jomp-Jomp Story. Some of the recurrent themes of these films, such as drug abuse, became so predictable that they were easily satirized in Walk Hard.

But in thinking about how these films diverge, after finally reaching the (somewhat confused) end of Notorious, I realized that in both the earlier film 8 Mile, the semi-fictional story of Eminem’s life, and in Walk The Line, the white performer comes to a moment of emotional overload that threatens his very ability to get on stage. In Cash’s case, this is because he is re-living his brother’s death; in Eminem’s case, it is because he has to face a hostile, mostly African-American crowd as a white rapper.

By contrast, in their respective films, neither Ray Charles nor Biggie experience this kind of stage fright. Instead, particularly in Notorious, there is an utterly natural transition from the private work of practicing and writing to the public arena of performance. This is even the case despite Ray’s having undergone, like Cash, the death of a brother while very young.

At the heart of this difference are problems of authenticity. For the white perfomers, the “backstage” moment of emotion re-assures the audience that the art they are making is authentic. Cash feels so darn bad about his brother’s death that it makes perfect sense for him to travel to Folsom Prison, there to perform a song about a man he (didn’t kill) in Reno just to watch him (not) die. Eminem is so tortured and vulnerable without the beat to sustain him that he deserves to do black music so selfishly, and to use it to get himself wealthy.

The point here is not to criticize Cash or Eminem, both of whom have done landmark work. Rather, it is to observe that these strategically placed tantrums obscure the imaginative leap involved in creating universal art. We don’t think Bruce Springsteen actually is Johnny 99, but the character lives and breathes regardless. Eminem is a great artist not because he’s remained the factory worker from Detroit, but because, over the course of several albums, he’s led us through the dizzy territory of being too many people at once, and nobody.

When Biggie steps up to the mic to record “Juicy,” the film presents it as though he is bringing his “street realness” to the silky, Sean Combs approved sample. In fact, if one considers what Biggie’s life was like at the time, most of “Juicy” is an act of pure, indulgent fantasy. He could barely afford to feed his family, which is a long way from sipping champagne when you’re thirsty. Later, when he actually had everything he’d been chasing, the songs were both more ironic (”Mo Money Mo Problems”) and, compared to his blistering first album, a tad anemic.

So, on the one hand, you have white performers who adopt fictions (of being black or of being a murderer) in order to express what would otherwise be an inexpressible storm of “real” emotion, and on the other, you have black performers who simply need an avenue for dishing up their “realness” to the world. But this demand for authenticity is misguided, and so is the reaction against it. TI vs. TIP was a casualty of T.I.’s guilty conscience about not being real, as was The Life of Chris Gaines. Meanwhile, flights of sheer, baroque fantasy like the Decemberists’ recent album The Hazards of Love suffer from an off-putting hermeticism. The characters talk to each other, but not to us, because they don’t reflect, unlike a successful piece of pop song fiction, who the singer wants to be, regardless of who they are. T.I. got back on track with his latest album because he succumbed to a new fantasy: he now wants to be a preacher.

In Walk the Line, Sam Phillips tells Cash, “If you was hit by a truck, and you was lyin’ in that gutter dyin’, and you had time to sing one song, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up…” It’s a powerful statement, but it might mislead us into thinking about the sum of our experiences, when art calls for the sum of our desires. Tyler Durden has it right when he puts a gun to the head of a convenience store clerk named Raymond.

“The question,” he says, “RAYMOND, is WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE?”

***

PS. If you have any doubt that Cash wanted to be the killer in “Folsom Prison Blues,” check out your local karaoke night. Somewhere, right now, a guy is singing that song, and when he gets to the part about shooting a man in Reno, the audience will go nuts.

Absolutely Fun And True Fact #9: The University As It Could Be

Dear readers,

I thought I’d give us two glimpses of what higher learning might look like if we followed Mark Taylor’s excellent advice about “ending the university as we know it” in favor of a non-specialized, interdisciplinary series of collaborations. These are based on experiences from the past two days. In the first example, we have a situation that brings together business smarts, game theory, wellness, the study of ancient cultures, and an in-depth knowledge of the Federal bureaucracy. In the second example, we have an interdisciplinary conversation that calls upon history, psychology, “guerrilla marketing,” internet business models, advanced strategy, economic modeling, and metaphysics.

SCENE 1: NEAR A POKER TABLE AT THE BICYCLE CASINO

Floor manager: Now what’s that you’ve got, Adam?
Adam: These are my new pills. Absolutely fantastic.
Floor manager, picking up the white and green bottle: Where are they from?
Adam: From China, near my home country. I have already sold about two million advance orders.
Floor manager: What do they do?
Adam: They do everything, they help you as a man, they burn fat.
Floor manager: How many should you take per day?
Adam: As many as you need for your own personal goals and performance.
Floor manager: Well, you see, I probably should take them, because I’m looking to lose about twenty five pounds. I don’t think I’m a fat man, you see, but I am a little, you know, thick. I’m physically a bit thick, and I should exercise, but I just don’t working these hours.
Adam: You could probably lose forty pounds taking enough of these. I’ll tell you what. You take this bottle right here, and if you like them, then tell your friends. Free of charge.
Floor manager: Well I’ll do that, and I’ll have some customers for you for sure if these things work.
Nearby player: Have they been approved by the FDA?
Adam: Almost! Maybe by June. Right now they are on the FDA list for “special grasses.”

SCENE 2: NEAR A PASTRY TABLE AT A BAGEL PLACE

Guy with a greasy moustache: I mean, I think all of this has to do with strategy. It’s like a game of chess. Do you like chess? I used to play when I was a kid. Actually I won a big chess tournament at the age of twelve.
Guy with a shaved head: Yes, um, I don’t play chess as seriously as that, but I like the idea of the game. Game of kings. So you say that this strategical stuff can also work with marketing?
Greasy moustache: I’m not saying it can work with marketing. I’m saying that it IS marketing. Everything else has been left behind.
Shaved head: Where do I get the rest of these books? And how do I apply them?
Greasy moustache: Well applying them is the hard part. Because you really have to make it a part of your daily life. That’s why hypnosis has been so good for me, because I don’t have the discipline actually. But I must have had the desire bouncing around somewhere in here, because I wanted to see the hypnotherapist so that I could make guerrilla marketing more central to my approach. And boom, that office is just five minutes from where I work.
Shaved head: And now there’s a second book?
Greasy moustache: That’s right. And I tell you what. I want you to get that second book so bad that I am going to give you twenty dollars. Here’s twenty dollars. Go on Amazon and order it, and if it costs more than twenty dollars, you contact me and tell me and I’ll make up the difference.
Shaved head: But you say these aren’t new strategies.
Greasy moustache: Well, to you and me they are new, to the general public it’s like wow, I’ve never thought of that, fantastic. But actually it’s all very old. Alan Greenspan was talking about it five years ago. But the real revelation is that Abraham Lincoln was thinking about these things during the Civil War, and that’s why the South lost.
Shaved head: I heard something like that. I love this because it’s like a springboard to my own thinking, you know, the stuff I’ve been able to pick up.
Greasy moustache: Exactly. Which is why these books are like soil for other books. That’s what I call them. Because they take readers and turn them into authors. And at that moment where you say–
Shaved head: –”I’m an author”–
Greasy moustache: Yes, and you recognize that in yourself, the Author Moment, something metaphysical happens, and that’s synergy. Because, you know, if I thought that there was absolutely no synergy, no authorship, and it was all just sell sell sell, I couldn’t do it. I would lose heart.

The NYTimes Says “End The University As We Know It”

Dear readers: every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. I don’t know why the New York Times published Mark Taylor’s op-ed on “ending the university.” If they hadn’t done so, I could have kept on with the work of figuring out how to write my dissertation without a teaching position, as UCI will probably not renew its TA contracts for seventh-year graduate students. Alternatively, I could have simply focused on writing about music in my spare time. Y’all should be sure to check the PopMatters “Sound Affects” blog for the upcoming post entitled “Just Say No To Dylan.”

But instead, I have to add to Marc Bousquet’s characteristically wonderful reaction piece my own observations about Taylor’s faddish and wrongheaded plan for academic “reform.” Thankfully, Bousquet has saved me the trouble of responding to Taylor’s calls for the end of tenure, and to his off-the-cuff, factually incorrect statements about the job market and probable compensation for so-called “contingent” faculty (who do not have tenure and are not on a tenure track).

I am throwing in my own two cents because still more of Taylor’s arguments compel a response: first, his proposal for re-inventing the dissertation; second, his ideas for re-designing the disciplines, ideas that are very subtly and very insidiously political.

Taylor believes that graduate students should produce multimedia dissertations, along the lines of undergraduate “final papers,” which have been transformed into all kinds of other rhetorical exercises, including websites, video games, films, and so on.

The overwhelming direction of these new assignments options is towards visual media; there is, increasingly, an assumption that visual media (or mixed media with some text) is preferable to plain text. This is not necessarily the case. It should go without saying that a certain depth of analysis usually requires a predominance of text. Of course it is possible to create a film that conveys as much meaning as a book, but the people who can do this usually end up in film school. The reason that most dissertations end up in a dusty attic, metaphorically speaking, is that they are written for a small audience of specialists rather than for Malcolm Gladwell’s audience. The problem is one of content, not one of form. Graduate students could be encouraged to write for a popular audience, but this would naturally lead to a disconnect between the demands of two very different readerships. Perhaps we have reached a point in the cultural history of the West where specialization no longer holds much value for us, other than in practical fields like medicine. Be that as it may, we have to discuss the matter directly, and not dodge it by telling graduate students to put their ideas about Duns Scotus in the form of a theology video game.

On to the second proposal. Taylor writes that we should

…abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

This goes together with his insistence that academia be regulated and reformed in the same way as “Detroit” and “Wall Street.” To begin with, one can only wish that academia received the same treatment as the villains in the world financial crisis, who were bailed out in handsome fashion because their services were deemed indispensable to the society. Moreover, in looking at Taylor’s proposed new disciplines, we discover a very cynical conglomeration of topics that would feel at home in a newspaper’s Sunday magazine, all of which quietly reinforce the capitalist notion of the empowered, optimized, mechanized individual. In other words, Taylor’s naive belief that Wall Street and Detroit are the thriving beneficiaries of centralized liberal planning — as opposed to irresponsible entities exploiting their stranglehold over taxpayers by dragging everyone down with them — is an alibi for Wall Street that goes hand-in-hand with his desire to re-frame academic labor in terms of politically acquiescent “deliverables.”

Consider how ludicrous it is to discuss “Time” as part of a program with a built-in “sunset date” of seven years, after which point it will be either “abolished, continued or significantly changed.” According to this model, the “Time” program is already defined in advance by a “project completion date.” It is unthinkable that such a nebulous “ad hoc” field would produce any radical new insights; instead, after seven years, the researchers would of course come to the conclusion that there are two types of time: managed occupational time, and leisure time, which we need to feel happy and fulfilled. They would cite old studies by Ford, and new ones conducted by Google at their employee complex, in order to help answer questions about how to make workers more productive; they would cite Proust and Bergson in their discussions of “off-duty” leisure time.

The same goes for the rest of Taylor’s categories. Notice how quickly he re-establishes Cartesian dualisms by splitting “mind” from “body”: the former would reduce down to cognition and strategies for optimizing cognition, and the latter would become a faintly nauseating playground for discussions of health, wellness, and sexuality. He invokes “Money” (”Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Dollar?”) but not “Labor.” He calls us to the study of “Life,” but is silent about death. Finally, he comes around to “Water,” the most incongruous discipline, which was his real darling all along. In giving us a quick glimpse of what the “Water” department would look like, he reveals that it is primarily a public works and urban planning department, concerned with problems of distributing water. As a professor of religion, his role would be to legitimize not merely the secularization of modern life, but the instrumentalization of human beings. Notice that he puts “theology” together with the “professional schools,” and apart from the humanities, who apparently do not have professional practitioners: “A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture.”

It is downright frightening to consider how the “religious turn” in academia has been used to justify what ought to be called the “neo-liberal turn.” What on the surface appears to be an interest in religion is really an interest in containing and controlling everything subjective through the definable practices and ideologies of this or that faith. Religion, like leisure time, comes to stand for certain human needs that those at the top reluctantly recognize as extending beyond food and shelter. As long as those needs can still be anticipated and regulated, they can be tolerated and even encouraged. The search for meaning can be doled out, after consultation with the experts, like so many cups of water, and the university as we know it can be brought to an end.

New and Noteworthy: A Poetry Blog

Have fun! Look for tomorrow’s post, probably to be entitled “Arnold and Me.” I don’t know exactly what will be in it, but it’s going to be an exciting one.

To Fix The Gash In Your Head

(Cross-posted to The Valve.)

You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album. –Lester Bangs, from “Monolith or Monotone? Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music”

It took me a while, but finally, after dipping my toes in the water by attending a mash-up party, I gathered the courage to go to a rock show. I have been semi-avoiding rock shows literally for years, and the blame falls primarily on an indie rock group called Mates of State. If you don’t know them, they’re a married twosome who make pretty songs using keyboard instruments and slightly off-key harmonized singing. They are so incredibly twee that they sound like the hired band at a leprechaun wake. I saw them at the Coachella Music Festival, which happens every year in a scorched earth corner of California, and before a huge assembled audience they were singing in their jaunty, charmingly tuneless way, dressed like clerks in a yarn store.

The set generated good buzz for them, at least among the people I know, but for me it epitomized a senseless optimism grounded in what we might call the music of being yourself. It’s about sounding awkward, dressing down for your shows, and then building songs out of small tribulations and the irrepressible, myopic hope that today will be even better than yesterday. It’s the furthest a performer can run from performance art without actually hopping off the stage. It’s the sung version of being over at their house for a cup of tea, bantering about the day’s gossip.

But you are not at their house, of course: that is a fairly expensive illusion you pay for, and the casualness of the performance belies the fact that the wall between audience and performer stays as high as ever. Arguably, in fact, the wall is even higher because they’re so offhanded, like it’s some kind of weird luck that they’re up there performing everyday life, and now that they are, casual everydayness has been stolen from you, and you have to pour your adulation on them in order to vicariously get it back.

Worst of all, in the midst of all this brightness, something is terribly wrong. It’s like the moment right at the beginning of Mulholland Drive, where the kindly old people stare and wave for just a second too long at eager young Naomi Watts. Call it what you will: guilt over the war, anxiety over the economy, the whole repressed mass of social ills and personal disasters that just can’t be sung away so easily. The same evenings spent hanging out and worrying about running into an ex-lover. The same suburbs you grew up in, or the Manhattan apartment that is so small you have to walk sideways past the mattress. The job that means doing tons of unpaid overtime. It’s the little things and the big, universal crises, both: the two feed into each other. Let a city – hell, a whole country — segregated by income build up enough places you shouldn’t go, or wouldn’t go, or can’t afford, and what’s left will turn into dreary sameness.

Out of all this comes the music of that imaginary gland Bangs invented, the burning ball of muscles, nerves and stress. You can hear that sound a little bit on the album by A Place To Bury Strangers. On each song the band creates harsh, sinewy distortion, propped up with great old industrial bass and Cure guitars, and sounding distantly like the Jesus And Mary Chain. This everyone knows, but not enough is said about how incomplete the JAMC project really was. On their earliest albums, they gift-wrapped most of their songs in noise, having already built complete (if wickedly cynical) pop tunes. The two things don’t quite integrate, except on the occasional miracle, such as “Just Like Honey.” Later on they wrote other songs that did meld sounds and tunes together perfectly, but the purity of the noise was gone: “Head On” isn’t going to make your ears bleed. Instead it’s a very poppy, measured take on hard rock.

The album that actually was terribly, completely, endlessly noisy was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, from all the way back in the mid-seventies. It was as grand a statement as Reed was capable of making. Using a bunch of synthesizers set to warble, stutter, choke and sputter out, he layered one computerized feedback squall on top of another until he had just over an hour of “music,” all of which sounds like the triumphant ending to a blistering, uncompromising rock song, or like the sharp peal of sound when a hand-adjusted radio goes from station to station. Reed left, like some coded message to all future musicians, this furious electrical storm wherein culture empties itself into one great ocean of noise. His own elliptical way of putting this was to imagine that the head of RCA’s “Read Seal” classical label had become obsessed with Metal Machine Music and had praised him for quoting Vivaldi and Bach and Beethoven’s 3rd and 6th symphonies. None of that is actually true, but as far as lies go, the Beethoven is particularly significant because those are the “Eroica” and “Pastoral” symphonies, and that’s what Reed wanted to create. He wanted to be the heroic author of a sound wherein the most primal modern desire, that of a pastoral return to brotherhood and sisterhood, was finally articulated and satisfied.

That’s what the album means. The echo chamber of culture, folded back on itself until it is pure “feedback,” is also the scream buried in the desperate relation between performer and audience, both of whom are trying to escape, through art, from the madness of their real existence. So all this real, necessary hope gets multiplied into an uncountable number of records, and movies, and books, and paintings — Mates of State and the rest included — until the individual grain of each work disappears into the simplicity of that desire to be somewhere else, to be something else. But Reed lacked the ability to put his vision into a single moment, so it stretches over an hour like a bad joke.

A Place To Bury Strangers discovered that moment last Saturday night. The concert was designed as a terrific and increasingly intense alternation between recognizable melody and drenching noise. The album sides definitively with pop: for the romantic ballad “Don’t Think Lover,” the band actually brought up some vocalist who otherwise didn’t perform, and he crooned it like a young Dave Gahan still working hard on being the loverman. It felt nice but too soft, even with the sarcastic refrain “Love lasts forever.” The bridge piece to where the concert ended up is also the best song on the album lyrically, the single “To Fix The Gash In Your Head.” Above the instrumental roar, you could just make out Oliver Ackermann singing

I’ll just wait till you turn around
And kick your face in –
To fix the gash in your head
To fix the gash in your head

It reminded me of a very honest song from the other camp, the Regressive Utopians Who Like The Beach Boys, called “The Gash”:

Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
Because I’ve noticed, all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
Because I feel like the real reason
That you’re quitting and admitting that
You’ve lost all the will to battle on
Will the fight for sanity be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had

Wayne Coyne sees a friend who’s stopped fighting, who is slowly bleeding to death along with everyone else, and all he can do is scold him or her for being a quitter. Other people have it just as bad, friend; when the current of love is running this shallow, no wonder “Utopia” has be mere sleight-of-hand, getting the audience to sing along to a kid’s book wherein brave Yoshimi battles the pink robots.

Ackermann, on the other hand, explicitly acknowledges the sadism of what he’s doing. He’s going to wait until you stop battling your way forward, until you turn around to see how your fellows are getting on, and then he’s going to kick your face in. In that moment you realize that he’s also doing this to himself, that he is also the subject of this willingness to push the noise too far, to drown in it, to deny absolutely nothing of the horror in order to fix, not ignore, the gash in your head. After that song things reached the point where you knew, from hearing the album and following the general outlines of the melody, what words he must be singing, but they were buried so low in the mix that they became indistinguishable. Finally, on “Ocean,” they brought out some fancy guitars in order to play the complex verse melody, and they did, everything starting out clean and beautiful. Then, by fiddling with some of his homemade Death By Audio machines, Ackermann summoned the wall of sound, and it kept growing and surging until the bass player stopped playing, then the drummer, and then Ackermann, and finally the sound was going by itself, but Ackermann couldn’t let go of the guitar. He bent low to the ground, whirling the instrument around, watching the cord snake and twist, lost in wonder. He played with it like a kid will with a flame, as though he was poking at the spark that started a bonfire. With nobody manning the machines, what was keeping the sound going, exploding out of the big Marshall stacks until everything else was silent? No longer one person, particularly not Ackermann, now almost ridiculously hunchbacked over his guitar with his Costco boxers showing, moving to an unheard rhythm. The momentum came from everyone in that room, standing on tiptoe, together in an agony of hope.

AFTF #7: I’m Simply Wild About That Sled

(Cross-posted to the Valve. Also, look for the post on A Place to Bury Strangers and noise music, coming soon at PopMatters.)

(For new readers: AFTF refers to an “absolutely fun and true fact.” I’m not sure if we’re actually at #7 yet.)

So you know how Citizen Kane, over time, with the exception of that White Stripes song that quotes it, has slowly boiled down to the fact that “Rosebud” is the name of his sled?

Well, a friend referenced that fact today, and it struck me that the greatest spoiler in history is a lot darker than I had previously thought. I’d always intepreted the film pretty straightforwardly: Kane’s life of power drives him to madness and sorrow, and in his secret heart, he longs for the innocence of his childhood, an innocence symbolized by the sled.

But that doesn’t keep the revelation from being somewhat anti-climactic; whether or not you know in advance what’s coming, you do spend three hours getting there. It’s much ado about a sled. That, it seems to me, is precisely the point. The thing that is supposed to represent pastoral innocence is a thing, a fetishized object, not different in kind from all the objects that litter Kane’s private castle. In other words, the mystery of the sled, like the embellished memory of it that Kane constructs from within Xanadu, is there to convince you that Kane has undergone a fall, that his life is fundamentally tragic because of it, and therefore that it has the grandeur of tragedy. But in fact the bathos of the revelation confronts us with the triviality of his life, and with the fact that the sled is little more than wallpaper covering a gaping hole. He did not fall — Kane rose, as history records. The horror of his life was that there was actually no riddle to it at all, and into those flames, along with the riddle, goes any meaning, any permanence a life might contain.

The update on PopMatters

Dear readers,

My first PopMatters post has been up for a little while; you can read it here, along with new stuff as I put that up. It’s the Lil’ Wayne post, so if you subscribe to this blog via RSS, you probably already saw it.

Next up, as soon as it goes through the editorial queue, will be a plug for Songs About Radios.

-Kugelmass

Those Obscene Octuplets

(x-posted to The Valve)

Greetings from California, where, as is now very widely known, people do crazy things with the help of doctors, up to and including giving birth to children 7 through 14 at the same time.

Since most people’s interest in the Guinness Book of World Records begins to wane by age 11, it’s surprising to me that the Suleman octuplets have created such an enormous scandal. They are an inescapable subject across completely different workplaces, social settings, and social classes. The story has been told by nearly everyone, major media included, in an emotional register that goes all the way from outrage to very angry mockery.

How will she (Nadya) pay for the family? Why is she so “obsessed” with having children? Why would she have more children if it meant that her mother would speak disapprovingly of her? Why would a doctor assist with the process, despite having taken some kind of Greek oath early on? Where’s Dad?

At first, this story struck me as merely another case of something small getting a lot of media time, a category that also includes sensational murders and descriptions of how the First Family relaxes. That was my initial reaction; as I continued to bump into the story again and again, I was struck by the fact that it is really obscene, in the sense of an event or practice that attracts hatred and disgust exceeding any legitimate objection. Suleman certainly strikes me as foolish, but why does her decision strike so many Americans as obscene?

***

The simplest answer is that she is bringing a huge number of children into the world during an economic depression. Even though there is little evidence that Suleman is currently penniless, we worry for the future of all those children because right now the future seems bleak, period. The ur-mother becomes a source of anxiety, rather than a symbol of American vitality.

I think the meaning of the event goes deeper, though. Look at how Yahoo! News reported the story:

 

There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn’t want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.

Her mother and doctors have said the woman was told she had the option to abort some of the embryos and, later, the fetuses. She refused.

Her mother said she does not believe her daughter will have any more children.

“She doesn’t have any more (frozen embryos), so it’s over now,” she said. “It has to be.”

Suleman actually played by the rules of the anti-abortion movement. She treated each of her fertilized embryos as a human individual possessing a right to life, and refused to either destroy the embryos or abort the fetuses. The whole event was set in motion by a perfectly justifiable procedure — she couldn’t have had any children without medical help — and carried forward by an ideological way of interpreting fertilization and pregnancy that has nothing to do with such concerns as the whereabouts of the father, or her ability to pay her children’s expenses.

It doesn’t help that the anti-abortion movement thinks about conception in a rigidly naturalistic way, and therefore has practically no framework for dealing with the categorical disruptions implied by these “artificial” births. The great storm of public fury that has been kicked up by these octuplets is more than an annoyance at the water cooler. It is a vivid demonstration of the price that our country pays every day for the comforting moral clarity of the “right to life,” a fragile construct that has always been partly about not letting pregnant women “escape responsibility” for their actions. If a mother’s life goes to hell because she can’t afford to raise a child, well, she should have thought of that when she let herself get knocked up. The child becomes a sort of righteous punishment, not a person — and, in similar fashion, those “outraged” by Suleman’s story clearly hope that she (and, inevitably, her children) will have a rough time of it. It is the worship of motherhood, and the hatred of mothers.