The Poem and the Apocalypse, Part 2: Children of Men and Frank O’Hara’s Personism

(x-posted to The Valve)

This is a continuation of my first post, from yesterday, on art and the apocalypse. (Note: K-Punk has also just published a very good analysis of Children of Men, that both overlaps with and differs from mine. You can find it here.)

The best thing about Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is that we never know what causes the plague.

This brings us immediately into the realm of allegory; the causeless plague of sterility is standing for something else, something omnipresent in film’s imaginary United Kingdom.

Yesterday, I described that something as “ideological thin-slicing”: the tendency to conceive of the world as limited to a very small set of significant facts and allied persons, with the rest of the material world consigned to darkened chaos, and the rest of humanity understood to be lost or antagonistic. I noted that this kind of ideological thinking is often repetitive and “cult-like” in nature, and works by conversion rather than progressive rational argument.

In the world of Children of Men, there isn’t only one synthesis or identity of the personal and the political. There are many, and many of these are ultimately destructive. It achieves the remarkable feat of persuading us that its heroes are on a different sort of quest from the various factions they encounter, one that leads back to a habitable world, and one that upholds a diversity of artistic modes. It does so by transcending itself towards its opposite, which we might call “Personism” after Frank O’Hara.

This post does contain some spoilers. Now on with the show!

CHILDREN OF MEN

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
-Bob Dylan, “Talkin’ World War III Blues”

In the Britain of the future, the government maintains order and security by closing its borders, flooding public places with propaganda, and keeping watch over its citizens. The ban on immigration is the first reason, allegorically speaking, for the plague of sterility. The only pregnant woman in the world is an illegal immigrant in Britain. She risks being imprisoned in a refugee camp and killed. “Britain Stands Alone,” proclaim the public service announcements, echoing the paranoid logic of cult ideology, and the policy of paranoid states like Myanmar and North Korea.

Public life is rent by unstable allegiances to different projects, all absurd. Like a customer who keeps returning to the store, to exchange one purchase for another, the citizens move from religious belief, to allegiance to their work and government, to terrorist resistance, and no such re-alignment is surprising to anyone else. There is simply no way to exist, in the world of the film, except by identifying oneself with a sect, and these too are at odds. There are a variety of different penitential religions. There is dissension within the “resistance.” Theo’s cousin Nigel is curator of the public treasury of art. He oversees Guernica and Michelangelo’s David. When Theo asks Nigel why he is willing to work at preserving art that soon nobody will be around to appreciate, Nigel responds, “I try not to think about it.”

What Theo asks Nigel is the unanswerable question: Why go on? As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Human All-Too-Human, the “for what?” is lacking. What are all the government employees doing bothering to show up for their jobs? All of the characters have the option of killing themselves legally, with the help of a “Quietus” pill from the government. Here, at the point where the entire country verges on suicidal collapse, we find the starkest illustration of Slavoj Zizek’s thesis, from The Ticklish Subject, that the Freudian “death drive” is identical with an excessive “unruliness” of human nature outside the natural order.

This “unruliness” is founded in the free capacity of the human imagination to dismember things, favoring the part over the causally bound, imprisoning whole. Zizek calls this the “violence of imagination, of its ‘empty freedom’ which dissolves every objective link” (31). This initially takes the form of an anarchic carnival of dismembered phantasms, and is inspired by Hegel’s “night of the world.” Then, in Zizek’s critique of Hegel’s writing on sexuality, he reveals how the imagination can also foster fixed ideas:

cultural ‘sublation’ not only changes the form of satisfying natural needs, but somehow affects their very substance: in a sexual obsession like courtly love, the ultimate aim, satisfaction itself, is disconnected from its natural ground: it changes into a lethal passion that persists beyond the natural cycle of need and its satisfaction. (84)

This leads, through a discussion of Tristan and Isolde, to Zizek’s identification of the death drive with idealism in the ordinary sense of the term, what I have called ideology:

The death drive is not merely a direct nihilistic opposition to any life-asserting attachment; rather, it is the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that enables us to overcome the stupid self-contended life-rhythm, in order to become ‘passionately attached’ to some Cause – be it love, art, knowledge, or politics – for which we are ready to risk everything. (108)

Returning to the film, one finds passionate attachment everywhere: religious belief, the zealous performance of duty, the commitment to libertarian resistance, even the cause of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ in Nigel’s case. However, the effect of this overweening stance is death: death to immigrants, death to government soldiers, death to resistance fighters. The plague of sterility thus stands for the total devaluation of life implied by the heroic call to “risk everything,” in addition to the hermetic self-enclosure of man, partisan, and country in a world shaped by zero-sum allegiances.

Even the love of new life, the fundamental loss of which leads to the apocalypse of the film, is transformed into death when a human being who happens to be the youngest person on the planet is abstracted and magnified into a celebrity figure of Remaining Youth. This is “Baby Diego,” and just as the film begins, newsreels announce that Baby Diego has been killed by a fan who did not receive an autograph.

The difference between Kee, the only known pregnant woman on Earth, and Baby Diego, is that Kee has the help of a succession of people who know her and want nothing besides her safety. Kee is brought into a network of personal (rather than solely ideological) relationships when Theo’s ex-wife Julien entrusts her to Theo. The relationship between Julien and Theo helps persuade Theo to return, Achilles-like, to the fray. The ghost of Theo and Julien’s child makes Kee’s plight more sympathetic as well. Theo is able to call on his cousin Nigel for the visas he and Kee will need. They stay with Theo’s friend Jasper, who puts them in touch with Syd in the Army, who directs them to a group of sympathetic Eastern European refugees who later will get personally involved.

This chain of personal relationships is politically effective, and at every junction it follows the Kantian dictum of treating other people as ends rather than means. Kee is instrumentalized by the film’s antagonists: the resistance wants to make her a symbol, Jaspar’s friend Syd eventually wants to make money off her, and we can only imagine what the totalitarian government would do. Even celebrity is a form of instrumentalization; Baby Diego is the unwilling vessel of a people’s reverence for symbols of Life, and it kills him.

This is the qualitative difference between work like Children of Men, and work like the Left Behind series. In the Left Behind books, there is a community of believers that must come together to resist the Antichrist. In Children of Men, there is a fractious but real network of people with the capacity to work for political ends. The network is constituted richly, in ways going far beyond the exigencies of the plague. At one point we see Theo and Julien playing a flirtatious game from happier times. We learn that Jaspar is fond of bad jokes, and that Theo tolerates his bad jokes.

(These non-instrumental relationships, which survive and help end the crisis, also lay bare the poisonous folly of films like Armageddon and Signs, in which the apocalyptic crisis is required to restore a minister’s faith, or to convince a father to approve of his daughter’s beau. As with the Left Behind series, but on an interpersonal rather than ideological level, this is completely backwards.)

At no point are these personal relationships in Children of Men completely apolitical or non-ideological. Jaspar’s relationship with Syd is mediated by the black market for marijuana. Jaspar, Theo, and Julien all share a common political outlook. Kee’s baby does hold significance for the entire world. It is simply that totalizing ideological commitments are never the whole truth of the bond. The relationships cannot be sliced thinly.

The particularity of these relationships points toward a rich universalism. There is no limit of heritage or allegiance that such relationships obey. Kee is dark-skinned, an immigrant, and not a member of the resistance. The Eastern European refugees who help Kee and Theo don’t even have a language in common with them. The universalist vision takes place not all at once, but rather moment by moment; it happens through the absence of arbitrary, prejudicial limits on the concern we feel for others.

FRANK O’HARA’S PERSONISM

This concept of “richly constituted” relationships leads us to poet Frank O’Hara. In his manifesto on “Personism,” O’Hara writes that the semi-serious movement

…was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

The poem arises out of the relationship – in particular, the love relationship – and brings it one step further along; when it is published, it still carries the traces of that afternoon and feeling. After his death, O’Hara’s poems had to be “collected” from the letters he sent to friends.

We might say that they epitomize a kind of relationship based on acquaintance, gratitude, anticipation, mockery, sympathy, curiosity, fellowship, desire – all things we see in Children of Men between the principals, all affective rather than ideological modes. Furthermore, these things are mixed up with each other, with the intrusions of the broader culture (a newspaper, a street sign), and even with the recognizable footprints of aesthetic and ethical thought.

There is no system here, however. O’Hara writes, in a manner directly foreshadowing Zizek:

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears).

There is also nothing about the reality to which the poem cozily refers that will stop when the poem ends. There is no way to answer the question: “Should O’Hara have written one poem more or less about Jane?” When O’Hara writes that he is after “the death of literature as we know it,” he means that he is putting a stop to the phony aesthetic universalism of Frederic Schiller’s dictum, “A book should be written for everyone and no-one.” With that, of course, Schiller has beautifully described the impersonal urgency of the polemic.

O’Hara’s Personism puts the reader in the position of producer, rather than consumer, since it is awkward to apply or imitate the content of his moment with another. One applies the form, instead. O’Hara, by defining his art in this fashion, is the willful destroyer of any celebrity based on a theory of his singularity, which would be no different from the alienating singularity of Baby Diego.

One of the appealing features of the apocalyptic fantasy is surely that a dire crisis narrows the gap between oneself, and one’s ideals. Instead of the sickening back-and-forth of idleness and rationalization, one has the efficacy of thought become action, and this is presumably the reason behind Cuaron’s winking reference to Hamlet (calling the suicide pills “Quietus”). A crisis makes heroes.

O’Hara offers us that same kind of exaltation. He defines what Martin Heidegger might call the “resoluteness” that organizes thought and puts craft to the test:

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives…. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it.

I’m not suggesting that in all circumstances one could do without polemic, and I’m certain that nobody, O’Hara included, was getting by without ideology.

All the same, we can get something out of O’Hara, and out of Cuaron’s film. In a comment to the first post, Bill Benzon noted that “thin-slicing” is the process behind most Big Ideas that emerge within the humanities. The price of this is a form of “cherry-picking,” to use Rich and Scott’s phrase, that instrumentalizes every work of art it touches along the way. We can probably imagine a different method, one which might suggest itself to us after we had a read a small group of works dozens of times, and which would be dense rather than broad in its readings. This careful attention would, of course, exclude that fashionable spinelessness — masquerading as pragmatic tolerance — which gobbles up any piece of dogmatism that is “funny” or “smart” or “genuine,” no matter what contradictions ensue.

***

I will end with a brief anecdote. That seems like the best way to work within O’Hara’s design. Before I wrote this post, I went back to O’Hara’s most famous poems, particularly “The Day Lady Died,” because that was the one a friend made me read, when I knew nothing about him.

For the first time (and this is totally unforgivable) I realized, by reading the footnote, that “Lady” referred to Billie Holiday. So, before I sat down to write, I listened to some of her records.

I cannot think of a better way to describe the feeling I had in between the last beat of “Without Your Love,” and the first note of “Strange Fruit,” then what O’Hara said:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldon and everyone and I stopped breathing

Of course: “Strange Fruit” is one of the most affecting “message songs” ever recorded. We do not know what song O’Hara had in mind, though. “Without Your Love” and “Strange Fruit,” undecidably together. That is the point.

The poem and the apocalypse, part one: Destructive fantasies

(x-posted to The Valve)

Recently, a number of different bloggers have begun writing on imaginings of the apocalypse, a theme that continues to haunt popular culture and that has changed in focus since the end of the Cold War.

The fastest way into these discussions is the link here, to N. Pepperell’s Rough Theory site, which points the way to relevant posts at K-Punk, Larval Subjects, I Cite, and elsewhere.

For me, all this goes back to a conversation with two friends about Frank O’Hara.

We were on foot in North Beach, San Francisco, talking about the poets who succeeded the canonical modernists, and my friend S. mentioned how much she loved Frank O’Hara. The conversation (I’m paraphrasing) continued like this:

“But what about global warming?” B. said. “I’m just so tired of reading poems that will add up to nothing when Greenland melts. O’Hara lacks ambition. His poems are monuments to nothing.”

“Well, but I love the intimacy of them,” S. responded. “His poems are like notes written on napkins; he explicitly conceived of them as messages between friends, or between lovers.”

What on earth does Frank O’Hara have to do with global warming? To answer that, we have first to examine the apocalyptic fantasies themselves. That is this post; in my next post, I will bring the matter back to O’Hara and his manifesto on “Personism,” which, according to its author, may be “the death of literature as we know it.”

*

There are basically two kinds of apocalyptic visions: those where no-one survives (or where the horror that will ensue goes beyond what can be thought), and those where a small, committed band of people fights for survival, usually against other people as well as against a harsh environment.

In the first kind of fantasy, our culture tries to confront its own total lack of response to genuinely troubling developments. Thus, people who believe the worst is coming are portrayed paradoxically as madmen who are mostly or completely in the right. For example, in the second season of the show 24, Kim Bauer is trapped in a fallout shelter with a strange man, at a moment when a nuclear attack on Los Angeles is imminent. The man built the shelter in fear of an attack which is in fact underway, but the drift of the show is that Kim needs to escape him because her father will manage to divert the bomb in time.

Even more telling is George Sibley’s descent into madness in Six Feet Under, which finds him staring hopelessly at a computer projection showing when the Earth’s potable water will run out. The show never gives the slightest indication that Sibley’s calculations are wrong, and yet he is portrayed unsympathetically because he has stopped working and relating to his family. As Theodor Adorno once put it, the message is basically to keep going because “the King needs more soldiers.” We are forced to make a false choice between the inaction of paralyzing fear, and the inaction of the status quo.

This false kind of reassurance reminds me of the hilarious subtext of the film Armageddon, in which the Earth is going to be destroyed by a meteor that can only be stopped by oilmen. Thus the symbol of the real environmental threat – the oil rig, and all the environmentally damaging processes that begin there – is defused by the miraculous good luck of a planetoid that the drillers must destroy in order to save our Earth.

THIN-SLICING

In the second type of milennial fantasy, which features a band of survivors, the crucial question is one of ideology. Basic ethical principles, such as altruism and the acceptance of responsibility, become stark necessities, irresistible for every person of conscience.

This is an obvious distortion of the realities of scarcity and disaster. No resurrection of conscience is worth the wholesale destruction of human lives, and the day-to-day misery of the survivors. When, recently, the price of oil more than doubled in this country, we did not experience a sudden return of moral values. Life just got a little more expensive, a little shabbier, for everyone, and a lot harder to bear for working people on the edge of poverty.

What is not distortive about these fantasies is the obvious desire for a common project that will order the world and convoke a community of fellows. This is the world-swallowing equivalent of what Malcolm Gladwell, in his self-help book Blink, calls “thin-slicing,” meaning “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience” (23). Gladwell’s thesis is that professionals who can perform quick, successful analyses in the field do so by figuring out how to separate relevant data from distracting, misleading noise…and by doing this on the level of unconscious reflex.

Of course, the very notion of “relevant data” comes from having a goal, which is why Gladwell uses almost nothing but occupational examples. Goal-oriented thinking is literalized in apocalyptic fantasies, which is why many of these fantasies make such heavy use of road and path imagery. The most obvious example is Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road, but I am also thinking of the journey to the sea in Children of Men, and the journey to Earth in Battlestar Galactica (with anybody who strays from that path lost to the vicissitudes of space).

This kind of ideological thin-slicing is understandable for two reasons. First, many people have the alienating experience of doing work that seems meaningless and irrelevant. Sinthome, a practicing psychoanalyst who blogs at Larval Subjects, writes that he began

…encountering patients whose sexual and amorous fantasy life was deeply bound up with visions of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization. For instance, I would encounter patients who had all sorts of fantasies about post-apocalyptic settings such as life after an eco-catastrophe, nuclear war, a massive plague, or a fundamental economic and technological collapse, where, at long last, they would be able to be with the true objects of their desire and their life would finally be meaningful.

Second, whether or not a given individual is familiar with Marxist theory, it is hard for most people to imagine their wishes being granted without the intervening elements of our current society being conveniently swept away. Sometimes this means blowing up buildings, as in the film Fight Club, and sometimes the mechanism is even sillier, as in the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, where every male besides the protagonist has been kind enough to die of plague.

But all this raises the following question: if Gladwell thinks that people can accomplish thin-slicing in the here and now, is this kind of intensely desired ideological thin-slicing already happening? The answer is definitively yes. In a recent post to his blog Acephalous, Scott Kaufman tackled the following statement: “Many domestic novels open at physical thresholds—such as windows or doorways—to problematize the the relation between interiors and exteriors” (Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture 43). Scott wrote:

The nature of the claim-structure is backwards here: I believe X, and “many” cherry-picked novels begin by thematizing it…. The “many” employed in this passage obscures the fact that many, many more domestic novels don’t open at physical thresholds. It also conceals the reason why many domestic novels would do so: they’re domestic. We should expect thresholds and windows to appear frequently for the same reason we expect spaceships to make regular appearances in space operas. Why even make the claim? Why not focus on how often tables or children appear instead?

The answer is that the relation between interiors and exteriors is a major concern of contemporary theory, when it is understood to mean the relationship between the “inner lives” of persons, and the structure of their society. The question concerning subjectivity effectively pares the domestic novel down to its windows and doorways.

This is only the tiniest example of the kind of cultic privileging that has begun to crop up everywhere in philosophical, political, and cultural discourses. It is strongly related to the rhetorical efficacy of specialized languages and dense symbolic imagery, because these establish the conditions for the projection of a winnowed world. I will use Slavoj Zizek as an example, because my next post will use him as a reference: even the majority of his admirers cannot help but worry that his continual recourse to Marx and Lacan has left him with little to do besides repeat himself against a changing backdrop of examples. As Adam Kotsko wrote in a review of The Parallax View, “many of the later books come to seem like an attempt to push forward a Zizekian ‘take’ on every academic trend that comes along.”

The same phenomenon of iteration is visible everywhere on the blogosphere, where the daily effort of writing polemics and responding to commenters leads finally to an exhausted self-awareness. For example, the blogger Twisty at the feminist blog I Blame The Patriarchy writes sentences like, “I frequently beat this dead horse, but I can’t help noticing that, despite my repeated floggings, there abounds a great confusion concerning the constituent aspects of ‘the feminine’.”

The point is not that Zizek, or even a given blogger, is actually wrong about the matter they’re discussing. The point is how uneasy we feel whenever we get the feeling that another person’s thinking, their entire Weltanschauung, has become mechanical, iterative. Furthermore, the reduction of the world by ideology makes fellowship dependent on agreement: the essential bonds of social affection get tied up in the ideological requirement of conversion.

The good news is that Zizek and apocalyptic art, at their best, are perfectly positioned to help us understand mechanistic ideology. My next post will look to Zizek’s book The Ticklish Subject, and Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men, as signposts towards a different kind of ideology, one that transcends the repetitive idiocy of thin-slicing and embraces O’Hara’s manifesto.

Untitled

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
–Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

I’ve boiled this quote down to the easily digestible part, which is a shame really, because if you get the whole thing in context then you get one tough cookie of a scene. This a scene where a young girl, terrified by telepathic visions over which she has no control, and largely seeking to escape from the world, tells a writer (who is fairly similar to Haruki Murakami, except he’s a hack rather than a novelist) that she should have treated her mother’s lover better. The writer rejects this; he tells the girl harshly that she doesn’t have the right to be sorry, because she wasn’t fair to the man when he lived.

A very good thesis about this novel would be as follows: Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance is the story about the excessive questing and emotional involvement necessary to counter the transactional and forgetful nature of advanced capitalism. Nobody is putting words in Murakami’s mouth here; he actually refers to “advanced” or “late-stage” capitalism several times as the novel goes on, and clearly thinks of it as a necessary point of reference.

Nonetheless, this thesis disgusts me. I can’t do anything with it. It sits there like yesterday’s mashed potatoes. I would literally rather have to wade in clown pants through a squalid pond of methanated swampweeds than write on the subject of transactional capitalist apathy.

My guess is that this thesis disgusts me because it is trying so hard to impose something on the individual, and this makes me wonder about the general drift of this sort of resistance-or-death pole vault. In Murakami’s novel, despite the initial claims of the protagonist to a state of vacant ordinariness, he eventually imposes upon himself the task of saving several people. A mystical wise man (the Sheep Man) informs him that he needs to “dance,” and his version of dancing is a series of compassionate acts, undertaken often with only a vague idea about who is being helped, or what they really need.

I highly recommend that you read LittleLight’s new post; incredibly, this is coming just three entries after her amazing prose poetry on the feminism of the monstrous. Obviously, I’m adding her to the blogroll. What LittleLight is accomplishing there is not something that I can accomplish, at least not at the moment, with my stomach feeling the way it does. She is re-creating the quest; the strain of perception which is like going down a rabbit hole, in that it restores the world to wholeness through the willingness to hope (as N. Pepperell has commented, in an insightful entry). A relevant quote: “It was an opportunity to decide if I would be identified by what was broken, or what was whole; by hate for those who had hurt me, or love for those who refused; by what other people had done to me, or what I believed people could do for each other.” The moment of opportunity.

In a post preceding her new series on Blogging for Choice, petitpoussin gives us a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver, which ends,

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

I think that one could read Murakami the same way, as asking a question of us that echoes in the wide chamber of the knowledge of death. He seems to be forcing the moment to its crisis. I will even say the text must be read partly that way.

I have been reading that way for some time now: for the tension, for the point at which the moment seems to jump out of its own skin. I would like to stop doing that for…well, for a “season,” perhaps, if that is the right unit to use here.

I would like to do nothing; or at least nothing where the sounds of it — the sound of a pen, or of water about to boil — get lost in the bustle. I am thinking of the way that a blade of grass feels if you’re stuck in right field, and you hold it so gently that it scrapes across your finger, serrated. I am thinking of the way river water gets warmer at dusk. I don’t want to make so much as a ripple. I imagine that it would be possible to read Murakami’s writer as saying that it makes no sense to push backwards through time, cutting and hacking your way with regrets, meanwhile also pushing forward into a future jammed with projects. Fairness and sincerity are immediacies; the closest you can come to them is the feeling of them, carried forward by a story in which they appear, but you would have to blend that with the feeling of Murakami’s sunsets to make any of it distracting to me.

Somebody saw my picture today and said I looked so much younger in the picture. Somebody saw my picture a month ago and said I looked so much younger. I am going to have to throw out two pairs of sneakers and my slippers.

I am sure that silence and slow time will give me back years. I have been listening to Elliott Smith. I can imagine picking up Beckett again.

So, if you have no quest, this is for you.

If you do — if you are on a wild sheep chase — you still have my ear and best hopes.

Questioning the Court: Roe v. Wade

And Judah said to Onan, “Come to bed with your brother’s wife and do your duty as brother-in-law for her and raise up seed for your brother.” And Onan knew that the seed would not be his and so when he would come to bed with his brother’s wife, he would waste his seed on the ground, so to give no seed to his brother. And what he did was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and He put him to death as well.
–Genesis 38:8-10 (trans. Robert Alter)

Today has been an inspiring day of reading in the blogosphere. It’s National Blog for Choice Day, because it’s the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Friends and shadowy Web anonymos alike have been weighing in with brilliant, lengthy statements of support for a woman’s right to choose. My own personal favorite entries, up to now, have come from Truly Outrageous, Tomemos, and Jane Awake. There have also been excellent re-postings at Fetch Me My Axe and Women of Color Blog.

In thinking about how I could make my own contribution to this project, I was reminded of a conversation I had about a year ago on the subject of Roe v. Wade. It was the first time I had ever heard the legal argument that Roe v. Wade was an abuse of judiciary power. According to this argument, covered fairly thoroughly in the Wikipedia article on the case, the Fourteenth Amendment was not designed to protect the right to an abortion, and the way that Roe v. Wade characterized the right to privacy exceeded the scope of the Bill of Rights and contravened “the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs” (from Justice White’s dissenting opinion).

One can also find in the Wikipedia article the argument that the anti-democratic nature of Roe v. Wade fueled the anti-abortion movement and, in the long-term, put the right to choose at risk rather than allowing a popular consensus in its favor to emerge.

1. The Constitutional Argument

In my view, Justice Blackmun’s legal distinctions between the three trimesters of pregnancy is the weakest part of the Court’s majority decision, and I do not intend to investigate or defend those here. However, I believe it is arguable that the essential achievement of Roe v. Wade was the negotiation between the legitimate state interest in what Blackmun termed “the potentiality of life,” and the Constitutional rights of pregnant women. This difference between potentiality, and actual infancy, is based on the viability of the fetus.

Tomemos puts the matter succinctly in his post:

Its status is the same as that of all her other cells: biologically dependent on her. It’s nourished by her nutrients, and if she dies, it dies. It’s her responsibility, a responsibility that cannot be shared, and as such it’s her decision whether to sustain it or not. Yes, you can argue that a newborn infant is dependent on its mother, too, but that’s not true—if others step in, they can keep it alive and growing.

In other words, the interest of the State in protecting the “potentiality of life” is actually the same as its interest in protecting the health of its citizens; reproductive health falls within the general category of individual health.

The right to privacy, where it extends to matters of personal health, is based on the understanding that the State may not protect its interest in the health of a citizen at the expense of that same individual’s own compelling interests. Men and women are perfectly at liberty to sterilize themselves or not; to use contraception, or not; and to make any number of other decisions (about diet, use of intoxicants, occupation, sexual activity or abstinence, and so forth) that affect reproduction. I quoted the passage from Genesis above to emphasize the point that the United States Constitution defines liberty in a fashion incompatible with some religious beliefs. The author of Genesis understood that one could not distinguish between the “potentiality of life” in Onan, and the same potentiality in a woman — but that is exactly what an abortion law seeks to do, sometimes in the name of religious values.

Justice Rehnquist wrote in his dissenting opinion that “The test [of the right to privacy] traditionally applied in the area of social and economic legislation is whether or not a law such as that challenged has a rational relation to a valid state objective.” He fails to grasp that the State may not choose to define these objectives differently for different individuals; to do so would be to violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

2. The Historical Argument

Whether or not a consensus about abortion exists in this country is irrelevant to the question of a woman’s right to choose. Since a pregnant woman’s rights cannot be defined any differently than the rights of another citizen, it is perfectly legitimate for the Court to rule as it sees fit. The barriers that exist between the court and the immediate will of the populace, codified in the established processes of nomination, confirmation, and tenure for justices, are designed to help protect the Constitutional rights of citizens against national or local majorities when such protection is necessary. In this sense, there is no difference between Roe v. Wade and Brown v. The Board of Education. The Court has the right to be unpopular, and even to be the source of popular unrest. That is in the nature of a representative democracy.

It is inadmissable to try, as Justice Rehnquist does by citing state and territorial abortion law circa 1868, to comprehend the meaning of a Constitutional amendment based on the State laws in effect at the time of its ratification. The language of Constitutional amendments always has the potential to exceed or negate the existing body of legislation, because the relevance of the Amendment to a given law is weighed and decided by the courts on an individual basis. Whether that happens at the time of the ratification of the Amendment, or a century later, is a matter of historical contingency with no legal relevance.

Whether or not a given case should be brought to the Supreme Court is a matter of political and legal strategy. That said, there is no reason to think that religious fundamentalists would have gradually converted to a pro-abortion stance. Their positions are based on personal beliefs, not on a set of debatable facts, or on personal interests (e.g. economic interests) that could be satisfied in any other fashion.

More to the point, the immediate welfare of too many individual women and families depended on this precedent for any person of compassion to fall mournfully back on ex post facto hypotheticals of strategy.

* * *

This fight is one fought in many different arenas. It is fought in the courts. It is fought in clinics that provide abortions, and in “Pregnancy Crisis Centers” that try to confuse women about their options and rights. It is fought within communities and within families. An argument about the Constitution and the Supreme Court is one way of tackling the issue, but many others deserve our consideration.

It is fought in different ways. I’ll conclude with a cartoon that I saw once years ago, and which was so unforgettable that I was able to find it again this morning:

On The Waiting Period

A good night to you.

On Pitilessness

“A masterful young jockey, that;—’ll have his own road, if ever anybody would.”

“Yes,” cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. “Why couldn’t he take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He’s a fool, and a bully. Does he think it’s manly, to torture a horse? It’s a living thing, why should he bully it and torture it?”
–D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

For this post, I’m putting the thesis right out front, so you can read it even if you have only one minute to spare: D. H. Lawrence once wrote that a living thing should not earn our contempt just because it can be destroyed. Actually, its vulnerability is what makes it a living thing. We are under no obligation to extirpate weakness by seeing who can survive bombshells. I like to hear what people say when they feel they will be treated respectfully.

The cost of a flame war is not something we know, for the following reason: the tendency of flame wars to produce a lot of links back and forth, and a lot of enthusiastic comments, makes them look terrific. However, we have no idea how many people decide they will never write a comment, or decide not to start a blog, or decide not to weigh in on their own blogs on a given subject. If that decision is based on trouble refuting well-made counter-arguments, so be it. But if it’s based on verbal abuse? Where is our triumph then?

*

(NB: A lot of people hold up BlackAmazon as their apostle of righteous anger, and I like what I’ve read of her [including her newest piece on Children of Men, my #1 movie of last year] so I’m adding her to the blogroll.)

It’s been an interesting day in the blogosphere, to put it mildly. Queer Dewd has just posted, sort of in response to my recent post, an essay about flame wars where he argues that he enjoys flame wars, and considers them a legitimate response to oppression, and then gives the entirety of some other guy’s essay on Milton and Rush Limbaugh. (Queer Dewd’s gender is complicated; I’m using the male pronoun because I think that’s what he would prefer.)

Of course I got into the blogging world in order to have interesting conversations, debates included. (My debate with surlacarte over Paul de Man is still going, and at no point has even faintly resembled a flame war.) Our opinions about politics and culture are not some essential part of ourselves, beyond the reach of legitimate reproach. It is furthermore a good idea to put our arguments in the strongest possible terms.

However, we are not talking here about disagreement. We’re talking about a particular kind of disagreement that primarily makes use of mockery, damaging speculation, name-calling, and reiteration. At its core is the philosophy of pitilessness: “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

I’m going to respond specifically to Queer Dewd and his spokesperson, but I think the issue is broadly applicable.

a. “Only the bourgeois oppressor wants us to conform to his standards of etiquette, which are designed to neutralize us.”

Sure, I believe in being uncompromising about political ideals. But the flip side of the justification for argument — that a position is not essential to the person holding it — is that attacking the person rather than the position is actually wrong. I don’t believe in being wrong. I like to leave that to my opponents. We can be angry. We can write angry. But if anger starts to muddy the message and decay our words into generic insults, then it is the sign of powerlessness. Powerlessness is going to make all the wrong people happy.

A word about this nonsensical appropriation of Marxism. What the bourgeoisie really wants, 23 hours of the day when it isn’t tea-time, is for us to believe that life consists of eliminating the weak and promoting the strong. They’ll let us take just about any position we like as long as the mode is competition. That’s what being assimilated means. Anybody whose position can be summed up as “let the rest of the sniveling babies go crying to their mommies” is being both pitiless, and, frequently, sexist. For example, in the Hawkes essay cited by Queer Dewd, we learn that “misplaced morality” condemns us to “eternal impotence.” Pro-flame preening can’t go ten seconds without lapsing into masculinist rhetoric.

b. “Flaming is what makes the right wing great. We should learn from them.”

We could learn to imitate nasty, unscrupulous bullies. Or we could stick to our strengths. You know what makes the progressives great? Their sense of humor. They can be very, very funny.

There’s a difference between humor and nastiness, which sometimes likes to pretend it’s humor. Nastiness makes another person out to be a plague, a poison, a sick or defective individual. Humor makes another person out to be foolish. We are all foolish sometimes; that takes forgiveness. Nobody should be treated like a plague. There is an obvious correspondence between types of thinking, types of rhetoric, and personal politics. If you think it’s harder, more risky, to take the high road, you’re right. There I don’t feel any pity.

If you think any of the bad karma that’s been going around is really funny reading, you’re looking at different threads than me.

We have other strengths too. Recently we have heard a great deal dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. He didn’t sound at all like Limbaugh; nor, for that matter, did Malcolm. Were they less effective because of it?

c. “The opposite of flaming is boredom.”

The opposite of having a strong opinion is boredom. The opposite of flaming is reason. Anger is not entertainment; it’s a call to action. Meanwhile, a simply entertaining post is not a flame war post.

I’m not going to write angry so other people can feed off that for thrills; maybe they will anyway, but that’s not why I write. Furthermore, this principle of negative entertainment is a bad habit, nothing more; writers like uncomplicatedly give us the opportunity to be engaged by clarity, pathos, compassion, insight — all things that sound like and are the opposite of war.

d. “People who plead for gentler proceedings are hypocritical, because we all have sadistic impulses.”

Hypocrisy means saying one thing, and doing another. It does not mean the difference between your imaginary X-ray of my head, and what I write or do. If this is supposed to be a brilliant insight derived from Freud, then believe me, Freud was 100% in favor of that kind of hypocrisy, and termed it “sublimation.”

Sure, we all feel angry and contemptuous in the midst of proceedings like these. On the other hand, we have other impulses, too. Like our impulse towards unheard voices. Not to speak for them, but to make them unafraid of speaking. Meanwhile, I’m always astonished when a writer switches fluently from rhetoric to the jargon of authenticity, as though these things were the slightest bit compatible.

Since many of these arguments read like a second-rate version of what somebody thought Friedrich Nietzsche was saying, let me end by quoting Nietzsche on intellectuals who found their thinking on “impulses”:

Alas, I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. [...] Spirit too is lust, so they said. Then the wings of their spirit broke: and now their spirit crawls about and soils what it gnaws.

That is saying enough for now.

A Plea: Monstrous Blog Wars

This is another short post. I wanted to keep this very serious moment separate from my discussion of YouTube and so forth.

People do not come to the Internet to watch one group of writers berating another group. It’s been very hard for me to figure out how to respond constructively to some recent remarks in the otherwise excellent Lolita thread at the Valve. At the end of the day, if the inessential Internet (like blogs) isn’t capable of restoring us to our senses, and leaving us refreshed for the rest of the battles to be won, then we don’t need it and readers will look elsewhere.

All of the political and social blogging circles were wracked again this year by in-fighting. I’m not talking about links with which one disagrees; I’m talking about a weird textual version of war, complete with defections and alliances. Again: readers hate this if they’re not themselves possessed by it.

Very recently, Truly Outrageous linked to a post on the “feminism of the monstrous” which I (and many other people) found wonderful. Then a blogger named Heart took it into her head to accuse LittleLight (who wrote the post) of plagiarism. I’m a teacher, and I have to be able to recognize plagiarism, and this claim just wasn’t founded. The reaction to it, however, has been so furious that we’re back in the land of “Oh God, I can’t bear to watch.”

This is a promise: I am going to try to be a more pro-active blogger myself. Reactive blogging is the kindling of blog wars.

This is an observation: letting irritation motivate what you respond to is natural, but it’s a bad kind of natural, like unlimited cravings.

Finally, it’s a plea. Let’s all do what we can to make this the sort of blogosphere we’d want to read, even if we had no idea how to post anything. I’m too new to blogging to hear this post echoing in many other posts, elsewhere. I’m sad about the waste, is all.

The Blogoverse Is Expanding: Formalism

Dear readers,

There’s a new kid in town: surlacarte, the Artist Formerly Known As Matt, who is a whip-smart reader of texts, and has been playing an extended, fascinating chess game with me over the dead body of Paul de Man here.

Check out surlacarte’s reading list, and his incredibly articulate new post on music.

And have fun! -JWK

Best, Worst: Blogs, Pop Singles, Movies

Dear readers,

The Kugelmass Episodes is proud to present the best and worst of 2006, as selected arbitrarily by a panel of qualified judges. Those of you who are selected are still in the running to be America’s Next Top Model. For the rest of you, there were a lot of tears, even more laughs. We’ll always have Paris, unfortunately.

So, without further ado:

The Top Five Blog Fumbles of 2006

1. Embedding YouTube

There are any number of good reasons to embed a video clip from YouTube. For certain political posts, it is important to broadcast a video clip that provides evidence. In the case of pop culture reviews, it sometimes makes sense to post media associated with the artist. However, YouTube made #1 in our list of Top Five Fumbles because over 10 million people visit that site every day. Which means that posting something hilarious or rawkin’ from YouTube to one’s blog, with some minimal, enthusiastic comment snaking around it like a textual bear hug, is so far from fresh that you could use it to make croutons. It’s a substitute for content, and it’s a specific kind that makes blogs look like one of those stoner pads with the televisions stacked on top of each other. Or maybe like a Xerox copy of Times Square. The video quality is just awful, and there’s invariably that horrendous, grainy “sample picture” of the video to come. Plus, most blogs aren’t really designed for YouTube (read: wide enough columns), so the embedded video shoves everything out of its way like a virtual Truck-O-Saurus.

Aesthetic say yuck?!

2. The Google Search Post

Sometimes I ask myself, “where does this post come from?” And I believe the answer is: it comes from unease with being publicly read on the Internet. Every once in a while a blogger makes subjective gold out of an improvisatory response to a particularly weird or sketchy Googler. Most of the time, though, this is a post that tries to be a joke and ends up being full of all those familiar questions: “How weird are other people? Like, seriously?” and “Who reads my blog?” and “Does my blog unintentionally reveal to the world that I am totally nuts in a very real and legally binding sense?”

We are going to answer each of these questions in order. First of all, other people + Google = every possibility that exists in the English language. It’s not so much that people are really weird, as that they sometimes think weird things, are drunk, and have access to a keyboard. It’s way beyond my standard “monkeys with typewriters” trope, we’re talking evil monkeys from the Crichton novel Congo, with DSL. The people who read your blog are…who cares? You started this for you! My words are still mine when I’m reading them, no matter how Google slices them, and the rest of the time they are like candy in a bowl, in an abandoned cubicle. As for the last question: yes. We know. Isn’t that a relief, finally?

(Also, the CAPTCHA test [the anti-spam test] is just noise. Talking about it is like a radio DJ saying “Hey, are you hearing any static on your end? Like this little scratchy etch-etch sound over my voice and the music? C-r-a-z-y!”)

3. George W. Bush

Whereas, when people produce dozens of different readings of Trilogy or The Black Book, I just love it, when people produce dozens of different readings of our president it makes political commitment (and blogging) feel strangely more futile. You can’t say anything about this guy that hasn’t already been said: he’s an idiot, he’s a conspirator, he’s a cowboy, he’s a little child, he’s a madman, he’s a walking talking space alien on coke. His speeches, and his manner of delivering them, have been considered so often and in such depth that we must turn our sights elsewhere. You know when you are flipping channels and every station has defaulted to infomercials? It’s almost 3 a.m. and you are eating Saltine crackers with no topping? That’s what the progressive blogosphere is like when a new rhetoricization of Bush appears.

4. Blogging Is A Dangerous Art, or Who Am I?

Naturally, I had to think through the switch from anonymous blogging to using my own name, and all of us reflect on what our blogs mean and how much of “us” is contained in them. Yet I do like the idea of the blog being the tip of Hemingway’s iceberg. The paranoia about certain readers (such as family or exes) finding us, and the element of artificiality in the construction of identities online, and so forth, could be worked out in the silence of the pre-post sips of coffee. I saw some well-meaning bloggers go down in flames this year because they couldn’t stop posting about the dangers of being read and being other.

We are always other than ourselves; thank goodness that, in keeping an online journal going, we can be the other that gives us greatest satisfaction. Whether or not one blogs anonymously depends on whether that other is within or without the social boundaries of shame, as we individually understand them.

5. Every Word Its Own Link

When I was younger I used to play this video game called “Missile Crisis,” where these crudely pixellated lines would come streaming down from the sky to blow up a 2-D row of shapes that represented my “city.” The better you did, the faster these lines would come down (representing missiles), and the more of them there were. I played this game approximately 6 million times, and am now a black belt in pixels.

Even I cannot manage to click on links that consist of the letter “a”. But the real issue here is not one of physical coordination. The issue is an intellectual one: the archives exist, either on your blog or on a mixture of your blog and other blogs, and you want readers to be able to find them. It is so helpful to explain what the links are, or to start the entry with a full title and link in shopping-list format. It is also very commonly possible to just summarize the prerequisite material without any linking at all. The alternative is a sentence constructed of tiny links. This is the blog version of Alice in Wonderland (and what happens if I eat this cupcake?), and each person who falls for its seductive convenience owes Mark Z. Danielewski ten dollars in royalties. I have confirmed this.

The Top Three Blog Triumphs of 2006

(I know. You’re thinking “shouldn’t there be five? Otherwise it’s too negative?” Well, there’s a difference in importance. It’s a slight annoyance, and occasion for comedy, if somebody makes a bunch of links hard to follow. On the other hand, these three things make reading and writing blogs worthwhile, despite everything.)

1. Respectability

It was so pleasant to be voted Person of the Year by Time Magazine. Sure, it was a cop-out on the magazine’s part, but it did reflect something that was in the air, everywhere. Music blogs are now a greater influence on buzz than any single media source, with the possible exception of Pitchfork. Political blogs were front-page news during the election.

Closer to home, “academic” blogs got a boost from all the attention at the MLA, which I mentioned before. Finally, despite hordes of marauding, adorable photographs of cats, the word “blog” started to refer to what disempowered, ordinary people think. Of course, it takes impartial, organizational sites like Feministe to keep the blogosphere looking sharp at a glance. But after the glance, it is the work of people like the ones listed on the right that makes blogging work, because the idea that “nothing much” was going on in our lives (or nothing much you would want to publicly state) started to yield to the writer’s epiphany: everything can be a thought. Everything can be an occasion for eloquent argument, or poetry. That is what will really make blogging respectable.

2. Excess

I want to put in a good word for excessiveness here. Blogging, as uncomplicatedly recently noted, is a messy affair, and it is certainly surrounded on all sides by anxiety. A certain anxiety about readership tends to buttonhole us into writing snappy posts that look good on RSS feeds, and can be digested in the time it takes to eat a donut. But sometimes you need to write a post that is twelve or thirteen donuts long. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen all of the bloggers listed here do it. You can come back to a blog post over a few days. You can learn it the way you learn a song.
I didn’t read all the way through all the novella-length posts myself. It’s impossible to find the time. But I read through some of them, and the rest are out there waiting to fulfill a passion. The excessive post is the darling of Google, whether one is searching for “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or “The Klein Bottle + Philosophy,” or “Lieberman,” or “asian fetishes,” or “cult thinking,” or “no Whitman“…you get the idea. Tomemos, I loved to see you going off on Veronica Mars. Spurious, I cannot believe how much you’ve written about Will Oldham; your only match was petitpoussin‘s thing for Justin Timberlake.

3. The Real World

This was the year of the real world. A commenter over at the Valve accused me of getting a little help from my friends on one particular thread, and in a sense he was right: many of the people who started out as Internet acquaintances here have since become friends in real life. There was an exciting moment over at Spurious when Spurious and Jodi Dean meet up, and Jodi makes vague, witty personal remarks. The exchanges at the MLA produced all kinds of unmaskings and new links (including Bitch, PhD risking a lot by giving a presentation of her own). A friend here wondered whether petitpoussin and Jane Awake were people he knew at Irvine.

In addition to revelations of the sort “I am the author of scarletpimpernel.blogspot.com!”, and the friendships that began through posts, there were also the leaks between online conversation and real conversation. Of course, everyone who says “On my blog…” should be shot in the fleshy part of the thigh (I offer myself as the first condemned), but the fact of the matter was that the re-discovery of content online led to an increasing number of parallel conversations over beers or lunch or in the hallway. It was an oasis in the desert of the Real.

And, come to think of it, people never stopped being polite. Perhaps the politest place on earth is the tenuous border between virtual identities, and real ones.

***

One last thing: I’ll list my top ten movies, and top 20 pop singles that weren’t on my favorite albums, in a comment to this post. After that, au revoir, 2006.

Buffy The Social Anxiety Slayer (PS: Little Miss Sunshine.)

Mary Jo, no one can see
What you’ve been through
Now you’ve got love to burn

It’s someone else’s turn to go through Hell
Now you can see them come from twenty yards
Yeah you can tell
It’s someone else’s turn to take a fall
And now you are the one who’s strong enough to help them
The one who’s strong enough to help them
The one who’s strong enough to help them all
–Belle and Sebastian, “Mary Jo”

I refused to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I just wouldn’t do it. The whole phenomenon was simply too annoying: I was away traveling for about six months, and when I got back everyone had at least four seasons on DVD and were singing live versions of the songs from the musical. I’ve always had a lot of problems watching horror movies — into my teen years, I still got nightmares from them — so the idea of watching bad guys turn suddenly into mean-looking Klingons (the vampire when she’s “on the hunt”) frightened me. I’ve never been able to sit through a slasher marathon; I would spend all my time in video stores just reading the backs of horror movie cases, and getting scared enough by two or three screenshots. (“At this candy store…the only thing for sale…IS YOUR SOUL.”)

Those are the bad reasons why I refused to tune in, despite all indications that the show was the smartest thing since The Twilight Zone or Star Trek: The Next Generation. The better reason went something like this: Buffy was the sort of girl who wouldn’t have talked to me in high school. This is also my reason for mostly disliking Vin Diesel: he’s the sort of guy who would have beaten me up in high school.

“Not true,” my friends assured me. “Buffy’s a geek, and all her friends are losers. Being a slayer makes her totally unpopular, and the show is actually a celebration of nerd culture. That’s what’s so adorable about Willow, Xander, Giles, and the rest.” This was usually followed by a reverent discussion of Allyson Hannigan’s beauty. (She’s the band camp girl from American Pie, and she’s just as adorable in Buffy.)

Finally, now that one of my good friends (Pons Asinorum to you) was kind enough to lend me the whole boxed set, I’ve been able to right wrongs by sitting down and taking the whole thing in. (Well, not the whole thing — I’m freely skipping episodes like “Inca Mummy Girl” that have too high a concentration of filler.) Watching one Buffy classic after another has been a rewarding experience. Whedon has a gift for re-contextualizing conventional plots to make a point. For example, a throwaway beginning in “Nightmares” about “active listening” becomes a way out of a day of nightmares coming true. By comprehending each other’s nightmares and entering them, the Buffy team save each other from hysterical solipsism (and, in the vocabulary of horror, from actual death).

I was also shocked to discover how much other people steal from Buffy. The relationship between Seth and Summer in The O.C. is just an elaborated, triumphant version of the Xander / Buffy relationship. Every character on Veronica Mars can be traced back to Buffy.

Then I felt a second sort of fear rising. What if this was going to trap me back in the world of pseudo-humor? Almost nothing else smart outcasts find funny is actually as funny as Monty Python; for example, the sounds that Orcs make in the Warcraft II: Reign of Chaos game are not funny. Also, “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” isn’t funny. Or what if Buffy was going to trap me in the land of corny action and male fantasy, like mediocre anime? The last thing I need is seven seasons of Lara Croft.

In trying to articulate this to a friend, I felt compelled, as if by an ancient curse, to utter the words “I don’t want to be pushed back into the basement!” We are used now to thinking of homosexuality in terms of the “closet,” a period when the real sexual identity is covered by conformity, and being “out of the closet,” when some degree of authentic sexuality has been achieved, along with the possibility of satisfying relationships and reciprocal love. Well, I thought of being a nerd in terms of a basement. It’s not a comparable level of repression. It is a phenomenon of conformity, though: you listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic and play Dungeons & Dragons because those are the worlds open to you. In the process, you develop an insular vocabulary and a style that marks you out. Some “nerds” try to celebrate their identity category. That excuses the whole American phenomenon of exiling smart kids, and ignores the weaknesses of cultural touchstones like Akira, which has over 35 minutes of dialogue where the only words spoken are “Tetsuo!” and “Kaneda!”

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have worried. Joss Whedon turns out to have the same kind of imagination as Josh Schwartz. In Schwartz’s world, becoming a poor orphan forces cool, aggressive Ryan to seek out Seth Cohen for help. In Whedon’s world, being a slayer forces Buffy out of popularity and into the company of Willow and Xander. Like Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, drawing her way out of an underground prison with a piece of magical chalk, Whedon imagines himself out of the high school trap through Buffy. She is the apostle of a reconciliation between the glamourous world of popularity and pleasure, and the salt-of-the-earth goodness of the nerds.

Whedon thinks in the same metaphors I do. He personally wrote and directed “Lie To Me,” which is the first appearance of actual Goths on the show. The Goths are repeatedly characterized as “lonely,” and their club is regarded with amusement and contempt. In desperation (over how much life sucks), they make a plan to be transformed into vampires in exchange for Buffy’s life. Buffy goes to meet and confront them, and they slam the door on her. The door has been doctored so that it only opens from the outside. In other words, Buffy is now trapped in a basement with a bunch of losers.

When the episode resolves, Buffy organizes an escape so that the poor Goths (now in there with a bunch of real, monstrous vampires) can make it to the surface. This is an ambivalent image. The show did work hard to “bring to light” the lives of the more eccentric kids in high school. All the same, Buffy is the one leading them out of darkness, foreshadowing the moment when everyone in Sunnydale will turn into her, not into Willow or Xander.

As for the insular language of subculture, that rears its ugly head in “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” also written by Joss Whedon. An episode that will turn out to be about a vengeful, invisible, unpopular girl begins with Buffy horrified at the sight of an inside joke shared by Xander and Willow. We see the whole thing from Buffy’s point of view: like two people quoting Holy Grail, they say half a sentence and immediately start laughing obnoxiously, and then another half-sentence and another fit of giggles. When Buffy reveals that she used to be May Queen, just like Cordelia wants to be, Xander tells her, “you don’t need that anymore, you’ve got us.” This statement is so painfully wrong that even Xander looks sheepish afterwards. Whedon uses the episode to build sympathy for Cordelia; meanwhile, Buffy tells the invisible girl, “I used to feel sorry for you, but I forgot that you were a loony.”

The same pattern recurs at the beginning of Season 2, where Willow and Xander almost kiss out of extremely palpable boredom (the “ice cream on the nose” scene). What was possibly the better romance plan — for Xander to choose Willow over Buffy — turns out to be dull, dull, dull. They almost hate each other when Willow starts quoting Star Wars.

Remember, Xander can’t choose Willow. That’s not the fantasy. The fantasy is for him to get Buffy, or at least Cordelia, just as the proper way for Willow to come out of her shell is for her to wear a sexy Halloween costume. It’s certainly not for Willow to spend more time on the Internet, even if the Net is her specialty. That way leads to Internet demons resurrected in metal bodies. Xander is good for a little bit of mouth-to-mouth CPR, but the only time Buffy actually “thanks” him is by dancing manically around him at the Bronze, during an episode when she’s basically out of her mind.

There is a lot more to say about the show, particularly about its version of sexuality, the engine of almost every single scene. For now, I’ll end by saying I identify with the show. I don’t mind its cool indifference to the plight of the Willows and Xanders who don’t have a Buffy. That said, the show’s just not Little Miss Sunshine. In that movie, the adult versions of nerds get together for a bus ride. You see, this stuff doesn’t end with high school — those outcasts turn into failed self-help gurus, suicidal Proust scholars, drug-addled elderly hedonists, and so on. They don’t “win” the beauty pageant — they take it over during a brief and unsuccessful revolution. They believe so fervently in the idiocies of American life (e.g. the faux sexuality of the pageant, self-help), and even in the idiocies of Nietzsche and Proust, that they triumph within the confines of their world. But it is still a world of exile. At the end, they are told never to re-enter a California pageant.

We can already imagine Buffy’s entry in the pageant. She would win. That wouldn’t overtake the other complexities of her personality — winning a beauty pageant could be reconciled with continuing to eat lunch with the wrong kids.

It also wouldn’t be a revolution. When fans of show snub Buffy in favor of the other characters, conveniently overlooking the deathly boredom of that claustrophobic margin without Buffy, they are demanding something of Whedon. He names that demand in the title of the episode that features the basement. Lie to me.

The Ivory Webpage

We’re sporting a new layout, based on my re-consideration of what blogs are and do.

There have been discussions around the blogosphere — at Acephalous, Rough Theory, and elsewhere — about what blogs are, what kinds of intellectual contributions they can make, and how the content of a blog relates to the personal life of its author. Many of these discussions began with the response to the recent panel at blogging at the MLA conference.

For my part, briefly considering the distinction (to which I was introduced at Acephalous) between “academic blogging” and “academics who blog” has made me determined to break free of the notion of “academic blogging” altogether. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, it is unfortunately the case that some “academic” blogs linger on the unavoidable details of academic life — the bureaucracy, the occasional drudgery of working with a lot of paper, the thorny micro-politics of the profession, and so on. In most cases, this kind of writing isn’t interesting to people outside of academia, and it also isn’t very interesting to me, since it’s difficult to generalize about internal affairs and personal work habits. (It’s also usually a bad idea to make such things Google-searchable.)

Instead, what we have is a growing network of intellectual blogs that focus on culture and politics. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of such blogs are worth reading; what you have on the “Culture & Politics” blogroll to the right is a contingent list made up of the friends, and unknown standout writers, I’ve encountered so far. If these blogs seem “academic,” that is partly because of the American desire to confine intellectual discourse to campuses.

These blogs are in dialogue with thinkers like Richard Rorty and Judith Butler; they are also in dialogue with Thomas Friedman, Chuck Klosterman, and others who fill the uncertain role of the American public intellectual. This very uncertainty, unwelcomeness even, is what makes blogs so important — Friedman is a terrible spokesperson, confused and overambitious, and Klosterman sometimes comes across as an underachiever, trying to reach profound critiques via the most mundane and evanescent artworks. (NB: Some of these blogs are European or Australian. They have good content, but I don’t presume to speak for the other social contexts in which they exist.)

There are also musicians listed here, under “Friends,” and people close to me who have interesting and memorable things to say about their personal lives. They’re also part of this; I only make a distinction because of the difference in imagined audience, which is the difference between how I’ve been, and what I’m thinking.

I’m biased in favor of cultural criticism over political journalism and polemic. That is because culture is more accessible than news. I continue to get most of my news from places like The New York Times, and have no use for polemics that don’t offer new positions or affiliations. The two spheres are not really separate, however, and most good cultural criticism comes out of the Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic traditions of political concern.