a la ventura: cassie’s syncopated heart

The genius of the heart who silences all that is loud and self-satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire — to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them [...] the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone walks away richer, not haveing received grace and surprised, not as blessed and oppressed by alien goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown at and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents, full of new dissatisfaction and undertows [...] namely, no less a one than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass [...]
She made up the person she wanted to be
And changed into a new personality
-Siouxsie And The Banshees, “Hall of Mirrors”

“It was nice to experience other people.” -Cassie Ventura, in response to questions about her forthcoming album

The two most traditional aspects of dancing — the formal art, and the public ritual of courtship — have gradually separated from each other. Technical skill has been incorporated into competitive dance, and especially into troupe dancing, which is inspiring (and a little intimidating, to me anyway, even though I do Support Our Troupes). Public courtship has become a free-form, Dionysian celebration at clubs, concerts, and festivals. Dance has become more playful; when you’re not dancing with anyone in particular, there aren’t any rules.

Dancing by yourself is a game you play with who you are, which is why the image of dancing in front of a mirror has always been so irresistible. The best mirror song, “The Man In The Mirror,” was written by Michael Jackson, the same man who essentially invented modern solo dancing. “You” are somewhere between your body and its reflection. In musical terms, that places you somewhere between the accent (i.e. the beat) and the unaccented measure — between who you are and who you could be.

This is not without its frightening side. The Kraftwerk song “Hall of Mirrors,” and the cover by Siouxsie, are terrifying. Britney’s always used solitude to scary effect, most recently in “Hold It Against Me,” where she beats the shit out of herself. The “it” is, of course, “your body,” which is as much a prison as it is a playground.

Jacques Lacan is not always the clearest writer, but he’s the authority on this issue thanks to his essay on “The Mirror Stage,” where he writes,

The jubilant assumption of his [image in the mirror] by the [infant] still trapped in his motor impotence [...] seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form [...] the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage [...] that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements [that is, the dance] with which the subject feels he animates it.

This culminates in “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.” In other words, the infant moves from playing with his limbs, to feeling trapped by them, to trying to dominate his situation by over-identifying himself with his own prison: “this is me.” This ends in madness:

The subject’s capture by his situation gives us the most general formulation of madness — the kind found within the asylum as well as the kind that deafens the world with its sound and fury.

Lacan feels that “psychoanalysis alone” recognizes “the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever,” but he is wrong. Music recognizes it as well. The trick is to use the mirrors themselves to disturb the pattern and provoke an unsettled openness. Thus Nietzsche’s “new desire — to lie still as a mirror,” and paradoxically to become “more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents.” Rhythmically, this is expressed by syncopation. I wrote about syncopation at the end of 2011, even though, at the time, I didn’t realize that’s what it was:

A lot of people ask me why I insist on comparing Katy B to the Bee Gees, which somehow manages to insult everyone, no matter which artist they prefer. Well, you know how “Stayin’ Alive” creates that weird, fluid rhythmic space where no matter how you dance, you seem to be on the beat? Which was pretty much the best thing ever for people with my dancing skills? That same trick works over and over again on the Katy B album. Katy slows it down to a purr where the beat skitters and freaks out, and then she sings her lungs out while the beat stalls and fills with bass. The result is bigger than the space it is given, bigger than headphones, bigger than a warehouse.

Syncopation in fact co-evolves, at least in the West, with melodic techniques that are, themselves, kinds of mirrors. Here’s Number 13 from “The Art of Fugue,” by Johann Sebastian Bach:

Actually, it’s easier to see the involution here (the dance, dance, involution):

Those are merely examples of “chamber pop,” but the future of pop music is in syncopation, which is why I was so relieved to discover that Cassie hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s still around and is cooking up a new album.

In case you don’t remember Cassie, she’s the R&B singer who showed up in 2006 with “Me & U,” an attempt to distill Ciara, Beyonce, and Janet into the simplest terms possible. Even the title is all of four characters long. She moves and she doesn’t; she’s been waiting, and she’s thinking about making that move.

She went on hiatus, appearing (of course) in the dancing movie Step Up 2: The Streets, and releasing some generic, charming singles, including “Is It You?” and “Official Girl.” But now Cassie’s back for real with “King of Hearts,” backed up by a small army of other singles, most of which haven’t gotten much attention yet: “Make U A Believer,” “Balcony” with Jeezy, and “Let’s Get Crazy” with Akon. I found out she was back when Pitchfork added the Richard X remix of “King of Hearts” to their list of best new songs.

Forget the remix, though. Like Kanye West’s own remix of “King of Hearts,” it’s an attempt to control and standardize Cassie, who is otherwise a force of nature. Richard X inserts the steady hum of an outboard motor, and so robs the song of that crucial, breathless wobble.

In 2005, her album cover made her look like a pop star from 1986; now, in 2012, she’s embracing a hairstyle from the proud Black fashions of the early 1990s, paired with clothes from the late Sixties. Rihanna, of all people, is copying her. Cassie strikes me as really, truly, off the wall. But that could be reading way too much into some pieces of dance music. I mean, it’s not like she’s dancing in front of a mirror, or something.

When you left them back on the farm
For the city at dawn
The drone of the young and the hum
Of the pretty were songs
You thought you’d never forget
It’s a pity they’re gone

When the sun goes down and the moon appears
You go looking for love in the hall of mirrors

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

Why Americans Did Not Watch The Oscars

(x-posted to The Valve)

The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through a series of painfully short and choppy montages) at films that reflected national fears, intoxications, and bouts of moral seriousness. Second, it’s a celebrity parade and fashion event. This year we didn’t need it. Why?

No Country For Women

At this particular moment, the filmmakers able to hold the aestheticist high ground are making Westerns and gangster movies (blatantly indebted to Westerns) without women. Petitpoussin already faced down this trend here, though she was content just to fire one shot, touch the brim of her hat, and move on in her quiet, laconic way. There Will Be Blood was so pathetically lopsided in this respect that it became farcical. In the final scene of the film, Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to achieve the iconicity of the word “rosebud” by having Daniel Day-Lewis give a speech about “drinking another man’s milkshake,” which means siphoning the oil from an adjoining piece of land.

If it was still 1988, then maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be a ridiculous speech. However, it’s 2008, and “your milkshake” and “my milkshake” irresistibly recalls the Kelis song “Milkshake”:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

All his life, virile Daniel Day-Lewis sits apart from women, and Paul Thomas Anderson exiles them from the frames, until the whole sexual life of the film is channeled into the gushing spurts of black oil and the oil merges with Kelis’s bizarrely euphemistic dirty talk. It’s sort of homoerotic, since it comes during an intimate moment between Day-Lewis and his enemy (a boy preacher), but the film has no idea what to make of that; mostly, it’s the inevitable return of the repressed.

It’s worth observing that one of most emotionally turbulent moments in the film comes through Kelis’s metaphor, since men without emotion were so central to 2007′s heralded films. Even Joel and Ethan Coen were guilty of finding this problem more interesting than it really is: grim lands demand grim heroes, money and death have a chill touch, and the masculine cult should be celebrated and condemned. Romance becomes the sterile, pre-pubescent romances of technology and treasure: Javier Bardem blows up a car and performs surgery on himself, Denzel Washington finds a good way to transport heroin, the fields are so rich with oil that Day-Lewis gets some on his shoe.

In fact, what emerges from the supposed aesthetic purism of this year’s nominated films is really the cowardice of the Academy. Superficially, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) is a pawn: the sum of his life’s ambitions amounts to choosing to work with one oil monopoly rather than another. Nonetheless, the film tries to minimize that truth, and compares unfavorably with Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis played a very similar character but the politics (and the little thug’s illusion of power) were the central point of the final act, not one rich man’s boring decline into decadence. The academy was too stodgy to award Gangs of New York an Oscar for Best Picture, preferring to wait until The Departed, which had about as much political meaning as a hair-dye infomercial. By the same token, when a film appeared that embraced the homoeroticism of the Western mythos, Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar went to Crash.

Julianne Moore, where have you gone? When Paul Thomas Anderson completed his real flawed masterpiece, Magnolia, Moore was there, giving an unforgettable performance as a gold-digger gradually discovering her feelings for her husband. When the Coen Bros. made the modern comedy classic The Big Lebowski, Moore was there as the painter and radical feminist Maud Lebowski, and it’s through her collision with the Dude that “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself.” In Children of Men, clearly the best picture of 2007, Moore was the leader of the insurgents who convinces Clive Owen to return to the cause. These films weren’t preachy or self-consciously politically correct about gender; they were simply realistic.

Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death — the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life. They are victims of the men around them, including Llewelyn, who puts their lives in danger while dreaming that he’s saving Carla Jean from continuing to work at Wal-Mart. The film almost manages to suggest that all the men — the “good” guys like Llewelyn, the bounty hunters, the suits, the police — are caught up perpetuating the machinery of death. But Carla Jean is still little more than Andromeda in chains, little more than Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, compared to Maud Lebowski or Marge Gunderson from Fargo. Confronted by this artificial wasteland of maleness, audiences were supposed to applaud; most of them just turned away. It was The Godfather without Kay, Casablanca without Ilsa.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that vitiated political commentary and lopsided representations of gender went hand-in-hand this year, but I don’t think so. The great political film of the year was Michael Clayton, and it owed much of its power to Tilda Swinton’s astonishingly believable villain. Female characters do not merely create possibilities for heterosexual romance and desire, or for (potentially sexist) outpourings of emotion. Without them, you cannot portray what Martin Heidegger termed “average everydayness,” the interwoven fabric of consummation and disappointment, luxury and poverty, birth and death, family and social life that gives rise to the political. Look at the examples from television — try to imagine The Sopranos without Carmela and Meadow. Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) is a better version of Daniel Plainview, in part because we see him interact with Trixie, Alma Garret, and the cripple Jewel. The hermetic world of men is also the American cult of the exceptional individual, taken to the point of feverish delusion and inimical to the common ground that political thought and work requires.

The unfortunate complement to these tough-guy films are the insular domestic dramas. They have incredibly weak male characters, mostly of the man-child variety, and take similarly improbable turns in order to be nothing more than twee celebrations of family. They’re love poems to America’s white suburbs with facades of anti-suburban hip. Last year, it was Little Miss Sunshine. This year, it was Little Miss Pregnant Sunshine. The Academy turned a blind eye to Quentin Tarantino yet again, but I’ll take The Bride or Zoë Bell over Juno anyday.

Fashion at the Oscars; or, Goodbye Red Velvet Carpet

One of the most interesting effects of the increasingly horizontal possibility of celebrity — reality television, celebrity bloggers, and so forth — has been the way it has redounded on traditional arenas and duties of celebrity. To the best of our ability, we now try to put ourselves in the position of celebrities, which means reacting to the phenomenon with the same ambivalence that they seem to feel. It’s no longer that we want celebrities to be flawed, human, and approachable — “grounded,” as the old compliment used to go — but rather that the process by which ordinary people with talent become famous is now our primary concern.

Think of how central Britney Spears’s story has been to the entire year in tabloid reporting. Her adventures this year were sold to us as a series of nightmares about custody and control. Britney’s out of control! Britney’s lost custody of her children! Various antagonists, including Britney’s mother, manager, and boyfriend, all took turns in the role of the morally dubious handler who seizes control of Britney’s life, particularly when she was forcibly committed to a mental health institution. They, in turn, would accuse each other of trying to control Britney, either directly, or through drugs, or by exploiting Britney’s insecurities and/or mental health problems. The reception of Britney’s artistic work was likewise transformed. For example, when Britney gave a terrible performance of the single “Gimme More” on the MTV Music Awards, viewers responded with comments like “Why can’t they find her a decent wig?” The anonymous “they” of this comment stands in for all of the people, of whom we are now fully aware, who find ways to manipulate Britney into being a marketable commodity.

The allure of the red carpet pre-show at the Oscars always had to do with our relationship to the stars: at their most distant and un-approachable, they were symbols of style. We still believe icons like Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn to have been stylish; even as television announcers gave us the names of the designers for each piece, we gave the stars credit for picking it out, and for exemplifying the glamour to which it alludes.

Three reality shows in particular — American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway — have de-mystified glamour to an extraordinary degree. (To some extent, the makeover shows have also contributed to this, but they are as much concerned with normalcy as with celebrity.) The dynamic of each show works to objectify glamour as something existing outside of any particular human being, to which any human being can aspire. The brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, Tyra Banks, and Tim Gunn is delicious for viewers in its cruelty, but is also meant impersonally. Glamour is not subjective; if it were, you could never teach it.

Therefore, it’s no longer possible to be much interested in what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet, because it’s no longer possible to attribute to them their own choices. If a celebrity is wearing something terrific, we understand that they have been guided to this choice by a series of handlers working with them. If they wear something terrible, we just wonder why they can’t get better advisors. It’s the same with the rest of the celebrity’s functions: while a dinosaur like Hugh Hefner might still have a reputation for throwing wild parties, a show like Super Sweet Sixteen makes it clear that party planners throw parties. The hosts merely afford them.

The dynamic has become the same sadomasochistic dynamic running through Britney’s story. For example, it was leaked to the press that the women on America’s Next Top Model were forced to go without food or sleep, denied ways of amusing themselves (like books), and generally put under unbearable strain. The show itself flaunted trials like having the models do photo shoots in icy water. Far from diminishing the show’s popularity, these revelations served to confirm what we already knew, which was that the process of becoming famous is a painful and violent re-education, with all the dramatic tension centered on what the wannabe accepts, and what she resists, and how, and for how long, all the while risking returning defeated to an ordinary life. Meanwhile, we are increasingly willing to watch specialists perform: dance coaches, karate coaches, personal trainers, stunt men and women, party planners, makeup artists, fashion designers. (My pick for movie of the year, Death Proof, is about stunt drivers battling an evil stunt driver.) It used to be that the red carpet was the stage for the individual accomplishment of taste. The depth of the image was the star’s own subjectivity. Now that we are conscious of the objective and cooperative process of producing style, depth is provided by interactions between people, insofar as each will or will not sacrifice themselves to the demands of the ideal. Anything less, for the contemporary viewer, is too shallow to do justice to the illusion.

A Colder Eye: Yeats, Radiohead, and the Economies of Late Style

(x-posted to The Valve)

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
-William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

Now that Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, has come to take its place alongside the rest of their canon, it is being compared to all the albums that preceded it. For many of my friends, who were in high school or college when OK Computer and Kid A appeared, the comparisons are grudging but basically unfavorable. The new album lacks the peculiar, engaging science fictions of the earlier albums; archetypal characters like the “Tourist” and the “lucky” man, and recognizable technologies like the airbag, were the only familiar faces in a strange country of fake plastic trees, karma police, and especially androids. The showcase “Paranoid Android” on OK Computer turned into the pseudo-concept of Kid A. He is an android-like character who is actually unnecessary to most of the songs on Kid A, but who nonetheless helped to create a feeling of continuity between the two albums, even as Kid A wandered off into icier, more despairing electronic territory.

For my part, rather than trying to suss out which albums beat out which others — an evaluation that tends to borrow heavily from the personal circumstances surrounding each purchase — I want to compare how Radiohead has evolved with how W. B. Yeats altered his style over time. When Yeats began writing, he wanted to create modern poetry steeped in Celtic myth. In part, he hoped to revitalize the heritage of Ireland; in part, the forlorn romanticism and uncanniness of those images corresponded to his own vision, which in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931″ he called “traditional sanctity and loveliness.” Running through Yeats’s early writing, as in “The Stolen Child,” is the strange complement of a homely, rustic existence, and sudden glimpses into an esoteric other world of pleasure, threat, and love. The image of the weaver unites with the dance; the faery frolic is simultaneously the anxious dream of a troubled, exhausted world.

Yeats never repudiated these early works; the work that time performed on his style was much subtler. He became more involved in the practical labors associated with all of his idealistic hopes for a new Celtic poetics: he took on Irish politics, he investigated the supernatural and wrote mystical books, and he wrote a series of plays that could bring Celtic myth to life on the stage. Meanwhile, poem by poem, the Celtic mythos was taking its place alongside a host of other references, including Greek and Roman texts. The imagery of silver, and gold, and the dance, and the loom, and so on had not disappeared. Rather, they had become the touchstone’s of Yeats’s sensibility, imaginative structures through which he could accomplish life-writing, a term that encompasses autobiography and memoir, but also the vast and freer literature of self-reflection which, among other things, describes the lyrics of most modern pop music.

For example, in “Among School Children,” Yeats begins like this:

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
the children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way — the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

Which leads here:

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise –
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(Apologies for the long quote — it’s hard to capture the sense otherwise.) Over the course of the poem, the aging Yeats thinks of his agony and the waste of time upon him, and reflects with sadness on the hope placed in children who nonetheless are destined also to fade. The ghostly presence of the Celtic “otherworld,” to which the child is stolen away in the earlier poem, is here the vision of pleasure without bruise, beauty without despair, understanding without toil, which is impossible.

The last few lines of the poem are often quoted, in part because they imply Presences and processes more real than persons: there is no dancer, only the process of the dance. The different times of a life are woven together like the parts of a tree, and so are the different stages of human life, juxtaposed in the classroom as Yeats moves among the children. But Yeats does phrase his ending as a question, rather than a statement, and gently suggests that the particular sorrows and peregrinations of his life do body him forth as himself. The poem moves dialectically between communal experience, including music, and individual experience, the body that sways but also loses its bloom.

The children resemble the young Yeats. They, like him, are the inheritors of poetry and history, to fashion as they will. They learn to sing, as he does in his poetry, and to cipher, as he did through his writings on mysticism. And, together with this, they are too clean — they cut and sew, weaving this, excluding that, in the ironically “modern way” that forms them into a mass. As Yeats aged, his references became messier, incorporating elements from many more traditions. His style began to vary even within single poems, as it does here, gliding between the old enchanted lyricism and a new sort of straightforward exposition. The style lacks neatness.

Returning to Radiohead, compare this:

Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge

With this:

You were not to blame for
Bittersweet distractors
Dare not speak his name
Did I cater to you
All your needs?

Neither quote reads correctly without the wailing sound of Thom Yorke’s voice, and the ominous backing from the band, but as foundations for the music, they are strikingly different. “Karma Police” is famously impressionistic. We have a sense that the man he describes here is a nervous, boorish square, and at the same time that Yorke is complicit in the poison of the scene because he is so irritable. But it’s just a sense, vaguely augmented by the paranoid invention of “karma police.” In the second song, Yorke’s singing to an unfaithful lover with a mixture of bitterness and resignation. The masochism of the relationship and the unhappy shallowness of it all are as vivid as initials carved with a knife.

Nothing can detract from OK Computer. The robotic dystopia that Radiohead created with their early albums is still fascinating. But it was also bound to devolve, like the commodity it was, into kitsch. The sad bears that Radiohead used as a brand, like the invented boy Kid A, became branded self-pity without a referent. The band Grandaddy took Radiohead so literally that they produced a whole album, The Sophtware Slump, that (in its unbearable preciousness) laid bare the roots of some of Radiohead’s imagery in 80s junk like D.A.R.R.Y.L. Like Yeats, who in “Sailing To Byzantium” compared himself to “a tattered coat upon a stick,” Radiohead has moved away from the uncanny multitude of their early sci-fi epics, to its complement, the searing, personal awareness of an absence.

You paint yourself white
And fill up with noise
But there’ll be something missing
-”Nude”

I’m McLovin It: Sexuality in the Age of Advertising

(x-posted to The Valve)

The setting is a mojitos-and-burgers place in the Lower East Side: shaded, pricey, with outdoor seating and fresh guacamole. I’m there with two friends, two other women I’ve just met, and a guy who isn’t quite place-able: he may be on a date with one of the two women. The guy, who we’ll call Roger (courtesy of Roger Dodger), sees our waitress arrive, throws one arm around her waist, and says, “If I wasn’t gay, you’d be so mine.” Roger is not gay.

Shortly afterwards, almost without a segue, Roger launches into his own version of the “blonde” scene in A Beautiful Mind. The original is the epiphany that leads Russell Crowe’s John Nash to the “game theory” that will eventually earn him a Nobel Prize. In the film, a bunch of men are huddled around a table, trying to figure out how to approach a gorgeous blonde woman at the bar. Nash, generally clueless about socializing, suddenly realizes that the blonde is making everyone else feel inferior. If his friends chat up everyone else, they all walk away with a date. Nash tells everyone to opt-out of the sexual competition, albeit in a way guaranteed to make the blonde woman miserable.

The epiphany is foreshadowed earlier in the film, when Nash loses a game of go. “I played a perfect game,” he fumes. His opponent, laughing, disagrees, since if Nash had played perfectly, Nash would have won. Nash responds by sweeping the pieces onto the ground and shouting that the game is flawed.

Back to Roger. In his version, the story ends like this: “But then, if you see that the blonde is getting interested, then you have to figure out how to lose the brunette.” So long, game theory! It will turn out that Roger also doesn’t know A Beautiful Mind, having gotten all this elsewhere. The waitress comes back, and Roger says, “I’m sorry, I always get in this mood when we’re out together.” Like what?, the waitress asks, and Roger says, “Oh, so obnoxious and funny.”

Obnoxious and funny do not go together, and they’re not supposed to. Whoever came up with that line — almost certainly not Roger — is using the superstitious quality of moods, which are perpetually so ill-defined that they can mean anything, to set up the boast about being funny. I’m funny is defused by I’m obnoxious, just as you’d be mine was defused by I’m gay. Since obnoxious is an ambivalent term, used almost affectionately to describe people who compel attention and don’t mince words, it appears to be self-deprecating, but isn’t. Oh, and as for the first line, which cheerfully and cynically makes use of the stereotype of gay men as non-threatening:

Then turn to the girl you want and add, ‘If I wasn’t gay, you’d be so mine.’ -Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists, page 22

In a lot of social circles, over the next few years, the majority of straight guys will simply turn into Roger, who is already a sort of photocopy. To a lesser extent, so will the gay guys and the women. One of the catalysts, though not the only one, will be The Game and the forthcoming movie based on it. (For those of you living under a rock: The Game is about a nerdy music journalist, Neil Strauss, who learned from a series of for-hire gurus how to be a seducer.) There will be a backlash — and frankly, it can’t come quickly enough — when everybody learns the new lines, and they become turn-offs. But this isn’t about lines per se: it’s about the evolution of sexuality in the context of economics and culture. Nor am I out to cheapen the discussion from the get-go with a lot of manufactured moral outrage. Roger’s not a terrible guy — the game is flawed, in ways that go far beyond Strauss’s book.

In the course of writing for The Valve and The Kugelmass Episodes, I’ve returned frequently to the cultural effects of a very practical problem: the expanding work week in the United States, the wage freeze, and the concomitant “Protestant work ethic” that has made it so difficult for the U.S. to achieve parity with Europe in terms of the impact of employment on quality of life.

In “Sexuality, Pop Culture, and Magic,” I wrote about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the strange equations at its heart. Buffy puts reason and work on the side of life, and magic and sex on the side of death — or would, were it not for the fact that life needs its opposites. Life without death is the undeath of vampirism, and life without enchantment or desire is also undeath, as dry as dust. Magic comes to stand for the secret kinship (steeped in Freud) between irrational lusts for sex and blood, and the irrational core of love and passionate commitment. Life needs the irrational, the passionate, even if that has its secret springs in death. It needs the music as well as the words.

Subtly, this conflates work with reason: for Americans, and perhaps for Westerners more generally, the profitable is the rational. Should it turn out that productivity demands leisure, and romance, and feelings of enchantment, no problem: we’ll roll up our sleeves and figure out how to produce those things. Also at stake is the determination of unevenly privileged people, such as white male nerds and workaholics, to bring their social lives up to par with their professional success. Tomemos put it in terms of the difference between “those who use popular culture to supplement and enrich their lives and personalities, and those who use popular culture as their personalities,” with Strauss and his ilk falling squarely in the latter category, whether or not we inveigh against such acts of mimicry and experimentation. Whatever is impossible or imprudent, and thus can’t be produced, can be simulated. For a long time, the empire of advertising has been precisely that necessary bridge between the good life — vitality, pleasure, power, and diversion — and the world of the working stiff — exhaustion, duty, and routine. Starting now, however, advertising is poised to make a big acquisition: it will become not only the way that corporations speak to consumers, but also the paradigm for how people represent themselves to one another in private life.

One way in which the work ethic has historically entered private life is through the self-help book. Books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, or Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, posited absolutely no difference between personal and professional environments: what worked in one would work in the other. But, because Carnegie and Covey were both unwilling to grapple with advertising, they had little to say about the good life. Carnegie advised taking a keen interest in other people’s avocations, because that greased the wheels of business; Covey dismissed this with a shudder, and recommended a sort of New Age, “spiritual” leisure that he called “sharpening the saw.”

For the most part, then, your leisure was still up to you. Meanwhile, Carnegie and Covey are the absolute rulers of the workplace. When you read them now, there is an eerie feeling of recollecting every poster in every office, every excessively promoted “mission statement,” every injunction to smile. Covey has a funny sort of anxiety of influence where Carnegie is concerned. Like Carnegie, he wants sincerity over flattery, the genuine instead of the fake, and he sees Carnegie as a man employing “tricks” because he sees the other man more clearly than he sees himself. Both of them use tricks that, as a whole, constitute systems. Modern businesses effortlessly combine these systems: Carnegie’s bland politeness is the model for handling inter-corporate relations, while Covey’s contractual “stakeholder” model influences intra-corporate management and the rhetoric of success: Our company finds proactive ways to expand our effectiveness while remaining in harmony with our core values of honesty, responsibility, and mayonnaise. So, lest anyone read too darkly into the following discussions of private life, it is worth remembering that human interaction in the workplace is already standardized to the extent currently possible, and that the workplace determines what kinds of social products will be offered for consumption after hours.

“Your leisure is up to you” — what a terrible mistake. Nothing should be left up the consumer, because on the small scale, people don’t know what they want. If they did, there wouldn’t be terribly much for advertisers to do. On a larger scale, everyone knows exactly what they want: an entirely new life. So Dale Carnegie proclaims: “I’m talking about a new way of life” (27). On the new VH1 show The Pick-Up Artist, Neil Strauss’s friend Mystery tells his disciples, “This is about building a life.” (All competitive reality shows, and all makeover-style reality shows, are based on this craving for a new life via deus ex machina.) But on the small scale, product by product, interaction by interaction, there is no new life. There is a promise, a glimpse: enough of an interruption of normal life that the world stands still. That’s the soul of the advertisement.

In the pilot for the new advertising show Mad Men, which is (not coincidentally) also a sexist tour de force, the characters begin discussing Freud with an uptight German expert, and finally one adman says: “So we’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite?” The star of the agency throws her out of his office, but by the end of the show we learn that he feels eternally disappointed in life, eternally at sea. He’s Lord Byron, in truth, and that’s why his advertisements are so good.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy anyhow: it’s nice to be secretly thinking like a rebel, to have unsatisfied longings. It helps to be Byronic. Otherwise, no depth — and yet the depths are all the same, or else Don Draper’s ads could never work.

Rules, Rules, Everywhere

The sea change began with the advent of rules, on both sides of the heteronormative gender divide. Remember the discussion in Swingers about how long to wait before calling for a date? Maybe that was the first time the rules hit the mainstream. It was certainly a great example of the comeuppance tale: at the end of the movie, Vince Vaughn is in a hysterical state of self-delusion, confusing a mother playing with a baby for somebody hitting on him, and dancing offensively on top of a diner table. Jon Favreaux, the ordinary schlub who can’t get over his ex-girlfriend, turns out to be much more mature, and ends up with better romantic prospects.

Rules and the how-to language of personal relations have seeped into culture because we constantly interact with strangers. Rules are a way of making the bewildering tide of new people and new relationships comprehensible, bounded. If one were to try to deal with individuals on an individual basis, one would quickly drown. Rules are also nothing new: guides to etiquette and social success have been around a long time, but history casts its changing light on them. We are emerging out of a period when, through the influence of the counterculture, universality was inflected differently. Rather than taking shape as a set of rules for individual interactions, solidarity was founded radically, on divisions between old communities and new ones: screen romances, like The Graduate, or Bonnie and Clyde, or The Hustler, or even Rebel Without a Cause, portrayed two people who helped each other take shelter against the world. The scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock bolts the church doors shut with a crucifix, imprisoning the adults inside, is much more unequivocal than the scene following, where he and Elaine Robinson sit nervously at the back of a bus. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas begins by looking for her late ex-boyfriend Pierce Invararity, and ends up discovering a secret society.

In short, the new comportment guides and the new flourishing of rules are signs of the retreat back to a more conservative world, constructed of smaller pieces: surviving daily social interaction, and trying at all costs to avoid permanent bachelorhood or spinsterhood. It is a world that lacks the political conscience of the original culture of rebellion. In the context of a longer working day, as well as a disruptive and predictable series of physical moves for middle- and upper-class Americans — college, first jobs, second jobs, and so on — it is very difficult to factor in the wishes of more than one other person. So contemporary sexuality is deep-dyed by the fact that for some people (male and female), having a committed relationship is not at all desirable, while for others, it is the only kind of relationship they can expect to remain consistent during their 20s and 30s. Even the worlds of swinging and “polyamory” are outgrowths of this renewed emphasis on the nuclear family model of caregiving, to the extent that caregiving and co-habitation can be separated from sexual monogamy. (For more on the romance of caregiving, I recommend the outstanding post on the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy” at Irrelevant Narcissism.)

However, we have a bad conscience about returning to rules, because it means downplaying the role of difference and individuality in social interactions. As a result, as I mentioned earlier, rules culture is steeped in fantasies of failure or punishment, and there are often echoes of the Commendatore punishing Don Giovanni. In The Tao of Steve, the main character eventually learns that his seducer’s rules stand between him and love, and the film ends happily with him in more “genuine” romantic pursuit. In real life, the film’s creator, Duncan North, made no such discovery, and the relationship failed. However, the plot arc of films like The Tao of Steve, Rodger Dodger, and Hitch do exactly what they are supposed to do: they reassure people that the rules don’t work when you’re really in love, even if the cost of making that point is sliding into territory so conventional that it would horrify Nora Ephron. It becomes possible for a blogger like thinkinggirl to write, after reading about a pick-up artist clone, “Didn’t these people see Hitch?” The modern climate is so retributory that Jude Law’s Alfie, who is mostly guilty of being an opportunist, is treated with vastly more anger than Michael Caine’s actually loathsome original.

In Wedding Crashers, also about rules and scams, the punishment plot doesn’t even cohere. In his supposed speech of apology, Owen Wilson can’t stop himself from calling the original scammer, now a funeral crasher, a “genius,” and the film ends with all the principals crashing weddings, in a big sentimental celebration of sameness.

The worst offender in this new series of morality tales is actually The Game, since Strauss is the one who appears to have stuck the match and lit the powder keg when it comes to new scams. The Game begins with Strauss’s guru Mystery on the verge of committing suicide, and throughout the book Strauss tries as hard as he can to portray Mystery (who now has his own TV show) and the other “pick-up artists” as too steeped in darkness to thrive. Strauss himself, on the other hand, is just a nice guy who has trouble with the ladies, and after he learns the rules of the game, he then abandons all of them in order to have a truly meaningful relationship with Courtney Love’s bassist. All of this is well and good, except for the fact that Strauss’s girlfriend now helps him promote the book, claiming that Strauss’s journey of self-transformation was probably a necessary pre-requisite for their relationship. The real people use the rules to intrigue us about the book, and the book uses a conventional ending, starring those same folks, to reassure us that the rules don’t matter.

Of course, in addition to this, that, and the salsa teacher’s lessons in L’Auberge Espagnole, there are also the bestselling books that together comprise The Rules, a guide for young women trying to meet and marry “Mr. Right.” Slavoj Zizek, who never seems to miss an opportunity to analyze something, had this to say:

‘Rule Girls’ are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules – an instance of the ‘reflexivisation’ of everyday customs in today’s ‘risk society’.

What Zizek misses in his analysis is that The Rules is not an example of reflexive choosing. Instead, it is an example of the fundamentalist response to the perceived threat of nihilism, a phenomenon entirely familiar as the pattern of contemporary religious fundamentalism. With a full view of the supposedly crumbling edifices of courtship and marriage, the Rule Girl tries to cleave ever more perfectly to the old rituals because the alternative is chaos. This is not represented as a free choice; it is a personal necessity (unless you want to be an old maid) and a social responsibility (loose women are letting the whole sex down).

It’s a very bad idea to think of fundamentalism as ineffectual merely because it is short-sighted and hysterical. It’s also hard to know where to begin with The Rules, even if one leaves aside its faux-Victorian crimes against the English language: “After all, modern women aren’t to talk loudly about wanting to get married” (5). Advice like “On the date itself, be quiet and reserved” (37), is a form of deeply patriarchal silencing, and one that could very well have an effect opposite the one intended if the man likes expressive women. There is a lot of advice about how to conform: what magazines to read, what to wear, what kind of haircuts to get. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the book thinks of courtship and marriage as such totally different, practically unrelated things that it sets the stage for very unhappy marriages, brought down by revelation after unexpected revelation.

There are certain superficial resemblances with The Game. The Rules pretends to be the inspiration for an underground movement, and advises leaving ‘em wanting more, which as far as I can tell is advice that began with the vaudeville circuit. More important are the two paradoxes at its heart, paradoxes rooted in the painful and irritable aloneness that all modern people know, and the despairing preference for aloneness. The first is expressed here, in one of many representative sentences:

Act independent [...] Go to the movies, to the shopping mall. Just go. This will make him desperate to catch a minute of your time [...] Men love independent women because they leave them alone. (120, italics mine)

To love and be loved is to be absent and inattentive. It is hard to imagine, beneath the bubbly tone, a more desolate message. Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider write, “A relationship with a man is different from a job” (11). Then they write, “We believe in treating dating like a job” (57). A riddle: what is and is not a job at the same time? Advertising, the collective dream chest. Or, as Fein and Schneider put it in a chapter heading:

But First the Product — You!

“But remember,” Mystery said sternly. “You are no longer Neil Strauss. When I see in you in there, I want you to be someone else. You need a seduction name.”
–Neil Strauss, The Game

EVAN: The guy’s either going to think ‘here’s another guy with a fake ID,’ or here’s McLovin, the 25-year-old Hawaiian organ donor.
FOGELL: I am McLovin.
–Superbad

“I’m Lovin’ It” is a single by Justin Timberlake. Released in 2003, the Neptunes-produced track was used as theme for McDonald’s same-titled advertising campaign.
–Wikipedia entry

The real glory of the McLovin character in Superbad is not so much that he thinks he’s a badass, despite being a dork. That’s a film cliché and an easy laugh; it was also true of two different characters in Can’t Hardly Wait, for example. The genius part is the name itself, “McLovin,” which conflates two different McDonald’s branding campaigns. The reason it has been so easy for people like Mystery to become gurus is that marketing was always already the paradigm for their invented selves.

Authenticity and Twee

For me, the happy medium is Twee: a return to the pleasures of holding hands, of shyness—but a shyness that is always one step away from hooking up. It’s conservative in its rejection of balls-out hedonism, but revolutionary in its rejection of the personal=political baloney. It gives us our relationships back wrapped in a light cloth of ethics: “be kind” is always the hidden message of Twee.
–Luther Blissett, comment to the Valve

Originally: ‘sweet’, dainty, chic. Now only in depreciatory use: affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish.
–OED definition of ‘twee’

Of course, there are many currents of reaction against all of these “manuals.” To my mind, the most significant reaction is not back towards some other ordinariness — what would that even mean? Cosmo? Maxim? — but towards a certain formulated sort of sweetness and awkwardness that pokes through everywhere in our culture. In pop music, it’s sometimes called twee or emo.

Thinking Girl writes:

Where is there any room for honesty, for authentic feeling (beyond sexual arousal)? With all the trickery going on here, we only distance ourselves further from the chance for anything genuine at all.

The question is what this romantic honesty will look like — what clothes, so to speak, it will wear. For the time being, we have our answer: it will resemble the films of Zach Braff and Wes Anderson, the music of Belle and Sebastian and Bright Eyes, and the continuing literary aftershocks of The Catcher in the Rye. There will be people who give up on clubs, bars, and what they tend to call “irony,” embracing gentler modes of interaction, slower and more tentative means of courtship.

I re-printed Luther’s comment because I still like it. Works of art, and ways of life, that put kindness and compassion first are moving, and have every right to be. Unlike The Rules, which are sad without realizing it, an unshakable melancholy runs through oeuvre of these new romantics, offering solace for unexpressed feelings, and a sort of respite from the pitiless march forward.

At the same time, this model is not a stable one; it is, at its best, a kind of mood. Let’s run with the work metaphor for a second: imagine you had a job where, in order to do it right, there had to be all kinds of delays, breakdowns, and failures. It would be unbearably confusing at first, and then it would turn into pure performance: the competent performance of incompetence. Nonetheless, this is the operative model for authenticity: EXPECT FREQUENT DELAYS. It produces paralysis. Some of you may have seen the new indie film Once, a romantic musical where, for no particular reason besides mutual indecision and awkwardness, the romance peters out and dies. Or look at the role of sex in The Catcher in the Rye: Holden has a lot of unsatisfied longing, but virtually nothing happens to him except a crash landing in a seedy hotel, where he watches a couple spurt water onto each other and gets into trouble with a prostitute and her pimp. We sympathize with his dislike of Stradlater and Ernie, but the truth is that all the while he’s dreaming of playing a woman’s body “like a violin.” He’s a confused teenager, and it’s distortive to reduce him down to his hatred of phonies.

When the paralyzed teenager matures into the paralyzed adult, the results are just nauseating. Everywhere Zach Braff shows up, he plays the same character: a hapless, sweet guy who needs one or several take-charge women to shape him up and help him resolve his issues. In Scrubs, the pain this causes is relieved by Dr. Cox, who, like Dr. Gregory House, is Humphrey Bogart rather than Holden Caulfield. In Garden State, nobody does show up to make things better, and Natalie Portman has to work so hard that, were it not for her epilepsy helmet, her head would probably explode.

The worst element of the new romantic movement is its regressive tendency. Even the “sweet” core of comedies like Superbad, Napoleon Dynamite or American Pie is inseparable from the emphasis on adolescence. Watching movies and television shows (i.e. The OC) about high school is reassuring because it makes us feel as though we’ve earned the right to look back with a knowing chuckle on when we were as naive as all that. But, as I suggested in my earlier post on reflexivity, this distance doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere: on its own, it isn’t capable of creating new content. Holding hands isn’t even something 12-year olds do that much; the omnipresence of hand-holding as an image of innocent childhood romance disguises the fact that, at least in terms of cultural representations, emotional dynamics don’t change that much between 18 and 28. What changes, out of necessity, is the level of concern with practical matters. There’s nothing particularly sweet about the romantic quest in Sex and the City, for example, and the message certainly isn’t “be kind.” Thus the nostalgia for adolescence is as desperate as it is superior, because what adolescence really represents is a period when there was enough time, and enough unknowns, that romances felt less arranged. In absence of that real slow time, we are back to simulation and the montage promises of the commercial.

In other words, the problem isn’t honesty. From a certain smarmy point of view, it’s honest to go around telling people you want to sleep with them. The problem is that people are trying to meet perceived sexual and romantic needs in the midst of demanding, or else unsatisfying, waking lives, and doing so under conditions of continual unfamiliarity. You can hurry love, but not without changing it in the process.

This is not to say that honesty is impossible. There are lots of honest artists out there, if by that one means something like “articulate memoirists.” It’s just that our definitions of honesty are inseparable from our ideas about self-understanding: distinctively honest artists produce confessions and acts of self-therapy from inside their own private worlds. Their subject is still aloneness, and there’s nothing necessarily sexual about it, or even honest when it comes to other people:

Can’t you see I’m trying
I don’t even like it
I just lied to get to your apartment
-The Strokes

Twee can be, as the saying goes, pulled off quite easily. It can be acted. One of the best twee songs out there, “We’re Going To Be Friends,” which was used during the opening credits for Napoleon Dynamite, was performed by the White Stripes, who are also heavy into sleazy, macho electric blues. And we’re still in a world of name brands: the White Stripes developed a color scheme (the same candy-cane motif as Target) and a gossip scheme (brother/sister? husband/wife?). As for Napoleon Dynamite, well, you’ve seen the T-shirts. We encourage you to vote for Pedro.

The Chickens Come Home To Roost: The Game

In the new world of advertising, the advertisers are, like you, alienated from their own mediums. They’re not corny, and they’re not trying to be plain-spoken. Gone are the days of the serious confidante with the sensible haircut, who looks straight at the camera and tells you how many doctors prefer Tylenol. Modern commercials are absurd and often extremely indirect; in order to know what the product is, you might have to go to the website (as with the Lincoln/beaver ads for sleeping pills, with the tagline “They miss you”), or you might have to wait until the final second of a 30-second ad. The new ad for Herbal Essences shampoo subverts the traditional image of a woman tossing her glossy hair with a grungy biker tossing his glossy hair. If a commercial is going to go vulgarly over-the-top, like the Axe deodorant ads where a thousand women rush one man spraying it on, there will be a ludicrous Ben Hur soundtrack to let you know that Axe Corp. also finds it all quite silly.

So our response to advertisements has softened. We resent them less, and periodically even recommend them to each other. In addition, we tend to act as though the matter of advertisement has been settled. We accept its omnipresence, and we accept that certain demographics (including politicians and performers) will always be on the hustle. For example, it is obvious to everyone that the “contest” between rappers 50 Cent and Kanye West over album sales is a sales ploy, but no-one resents them for putting on the pageant.

Now, of course, it’s irritating if somebody gives you the hard sell. Nobody wants another round of the Dale Carnegie school of aggressively friendly networking. But then nobody wants to see an old school, “trust 4 out of 5 experts” advertisement either. A guy like Mystery isn’t modeling himself after John D. Rockefeller. He’s modeling himself after Prince; who says other guys can’t change their names just because they don’t have recording contracts? Rock stars and movie stars don’t have the same names as other people, don’t dress like other people, and don’t act like other people; they fulfill all kinds of fantasies, most of which are on display on American Idol (not to mention America’s Next Top Model, from which Mystery’s show shamelessly cribs). But again, American Idol depends on a line drawn between contestants and non-contestants, winners and losers, which exists only through the show’s own arbitrary structure. There are no fixed limits on who gets to simulate being a rock star, and who doesn’t. So Mystery tells people to change their names, to dress like rock stars (“peacock theory”), and to act with the diffidence of a celebrity. At the end of Superbad, the cops pretend to be dragging McLovin off to jail so that he will have more cred.

There are also none of the usual guardrails up, that would otherwise make behavior predictable and boring. An opening line isn’t going to sound like an opening line, just like an ad won’t look like an ad. The line will be stolen from one of the woolgathering monologues in Sex and the City: “Is kissing cheating?” (from “The Cheating Curve”). Or it will be just random, about a barfight, or flossing, or something else left-field and non-sexual. A straightforward question, like “What do you do?”, will get an indirect, absurdist answer, because small talk is boring.

Since the pick-up artists in The Game have nothing to sell but themselves, they become cultural flypaper, gleefully adopting whatever language of connection and empathy they can get from self-help books, and then glazing the whole thing with irony: normally, I’d feel embarrassed to say this, but with you I can talk openly. There was a recent ad campaign for Bacardi where the drinker took a sip, and was (per usual) transported to a world of music, dancing, and gorgeous people. At the end of the ad, it turned out that this whole Xanadu was imaginary — the ad itself owned up to it. Bacardi can make you feel like there’s a party going on, even though there probably isn’t. So, too, a pick-up artist can talk to you about his dream of sipping ouzo in Corfu, and then, if somebody calls him on it, exclaim with ironic sophistication: “I know! It will probably never happen, but it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?”

When I talk about “the chickens coming home to roost,” I mean that every structure designed to compensate for the absence of real understanding can be appropriated. Strauss writes,

“I have to ask you guys: How long have you known each other?” I began.
“About six years,” one of the girls said.
“I could totally tell.”
“How?”
“Rather than explain, I’ll give you two the best friends test.”

The girls leaned in toward me, thrilled by the idea of an innocuous test. Guys in the community have an expression for this phenomenon: I was giving them “chick crack.” Most women, they say, respond to routines involving tests, psychological games, fortune-telling, and cold-reading. (159)

Yes, how disgusting. But that’s not the only thing to take away from the anecdote. As a whole society, we are thrilled by personality tests and the like. You might not be into tarot, just like you might not be into Limp Bizkit, but in that case the Asperger’s Test could be right for you. The men in Strauss’s world aren’t going to go up to anyone and ask their sign — that’s both too obvious and too open-ended. But the wealth of superstition, and the intense hunger for easily obtained self-knowledge, are there waiting to be exploited. It’s just not true that one can play around with, “bracket,” a belief in the supernatural, magic, New Age speculation, or more rigorous-looking things that work like magic — personality tests, number games, and so on. Inevitably, in the equally bracketed world of the personal, all of it will reappear as someone’s deliberate creation. The British mentalist Derren Brown performed a trick where he obtained handprints, birthdates, and a personal object from people in New York, the UK, and Barcelona. He then gave them a personalized psychic reading, which many participants claimed was both highly specific and very accurate (90% or more). Brown gave all of them an identical reading.

Conclusion: Coming Soon To A Theater Near You

In the final instance, [love] amounts to modern society’s radicalization of the difference between personal and impersonal relationships. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that this difference can be experienced in every social relationship: impersonal relationships are ‘only’ impersonal relationships. Personal relationships are overburdened by the expectation that one will be in tune with the person, and this often dooms such relationships to failure — which in turn only serves to intensify the quest for them and makes the inadequacy of exclusively impersonal relationships all the more apparent.

…This could mean that, contrary to earlier claims, a deeper understanding of love is hardly a suitable guide nowadays to entering into or warming to an intimate relationship. Notions based on exchange that have been blocked out of the code of real love may be more suited to this task, although it is impossible to specify how selflessness and an orientation to the other person could become embedded in a broader and deeper understanding of exchange.

…Other approaches often question how it is even possible to initiate personal communication in public situations and given the brevity of contact which is to be expected in such cases.

-Niklas Luhmann, Love As Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, 161-162

As with the advertisement, the history of the film trailer has become more interesting in the last ten years than for fifty years preceding. Trailers are easily available: you can watch them from home, you can collect them (by downloading them to your computer or buying the film on DVD), and they have even developed their own logic of tension and fulfillment, over and above the tension and expectation they create for the film itself. The studio will release a “teaser” trailer, which creates an appetite for the full-length trailer. The notion of showing up on time to a movie has become showing up for around 20 minutes of trailers, including as a lead-up to feature presentations that might not be 90 minutes long.

The trailer has become reflexive; there are now trailers, like those for Comedian and The Ten, that are satires of other trailers. Trailer voice-overs are now subverted or used parodically. Also like advertisements, the medium has become respectable, and it is perfectly normal to recommend a trailer just as you would any other piece of media. In short, the trailer as a form has taken on its share of cultural significance, influencing culture in ways different from movies. What had to happen, happened with Grindhouse: numerous trailers for films that have not, nor will ever be, actually made. This is how seduction works in The Game. It is a series of calculated gestures towards something that isn’t there — brave, glamorous, emotional life, life anew.

Attempts to re-codify intimacy over the long run, like The Rules, can achieve only limited success. The project isn’t original, and in a society that (consciously, at least) resists codification, anybody who is trying to use rules of any sort will seem desperate and inauthentic. New pick-up lines will be used up and discarded, and even body language will perhaps become a contested and intentional field.

However, what Luhmann calls the “radicalization of the difference between personal and impersonal relationships” will continue, and the world of the personal “connection” will continue merging with the world of excess and spectacle, which has likewise been excluded from the impersonal world and its ethic of efficiency. The emotive pop star is already this synthesis.

What appears to Luhmann as the possibly insoluble question of “how it is even possible to initiate personal communication in public situations” has been solved by the romantic equivalent of the trailer: cold-readings, flights of fancy, and acts of comradely ironic distantiation that all serve to simulate commonality through the fantasy of a good life, a shared life…and not only to simulate it. There is real commonality in the fact that the world is increasingly standardized and interconnected — crashing a wedding is not only possible, but desirable in a world where the same things go over everywhere. The ecstasy of Wedding Crashers is in the fact that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s characters do not merely blend in, sampling the caviar. They are at the center of the event, making toasts and balloon animals. It is imaginable that people would one day hire wedding crashers, just as they currently hire musicians and wedding planners. In a sense, Derren Brown’s marks were right to praise the accuracy of his psychic readings.

Considering the wretchedly lonely people who are picked as contestants for shows like The Pick-Up Artist, and considering the heartbreaking losses that cry out from every word of The Rules, it would be easy enough to end up on a note of wry sufferance, as Peter Guralnick does at the beginning of his exceptional study of Elvis, “In the end, there should be nothing shocking about human existence, because, in the end, whatever has occurred is simply human” (Last Train to Memphis xiv). But then I consider how well a pity party of this sort begs the question. After all, a survey of misogynistic male bloggers in the UK Observer ended like this: “I’m kind of wryly charmed. Maybe, once you get past the prostitutes and the posturing, even with these tough guys, all you need is love.” It reminds me of the useless psychologisms that dilute Strauss’s study of Mystery, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s study (in Magnolia) of Tom Cruise’s Frank Mackey: they weren’t loved enough as children, poor dears.

Or, on the other hand, I could side with conservative philosophers like Harry G. Frankfurt, who argued in On Bullshit that Americans are increasingly indifferent to the truth-value of discourse; inevitably, he would see seducers and rules-mongers as a monkey wrench gang that wants words and signifying acts to have power independent of the world, of the way things “really are.” But this betrays my own feeling that we do, in fact, inhabit fictions, and that the value of those fictions is determined in large part by our happiness, rather than by their fidelity to a vast and impersonal truth.

Instead, I will end by suggesting that the intertwined phenomena of individuality and intimacy are both vastly expensive fictions: expensive in time, and rich in failure. In the truest sense of the term, they are luxuries. Luhmann considered it “impossible to specify how selflessness and an orientation to the other person might become embedded in a broader and deeper understanding of exchange.” It isn’t enough to hold the line against seduction, or chicanery, or the irrational: the game is flawed. There is a chicken-and-egg problem here. I don’t see how we can embrace the larger fictions of selflessness and devotion without greater security, equality, and leisure, things one person cannot have at another’s expense. Nor do I see how, without that, we can hope to supplant the stingy, stagey drama of practiced interaction with something finer — as Yeats expressed it, with something wrought of high laughter, loveliness, and ease.

The History of Nice Guys

Dear readers,

I am suddenly in Boston, still exhausted from 23 hours in planes and airports. In two days I begin teaching at a prep school here, all the way until I return to Irvine in August. I’ve been trying to keep current through wireless, including dealing with my old laptop dying and needing an heir. I just posted an academic piece on Barthes, Hugh Kenner, Freud, and Rousseau over at The Valve, in which I tried to put modernism together with the origins of trauma theory. It’s about knots, scars, and the opera. Meanwhile, over here, I thought I’d respond to LittleLight, who asks her readers whether any of them were ever Nice Guys™, and how they recovered from it, so we can do a better job with the next generation. (This is also my way of giving a quick nod to Taking Steps, which is as thrilling now as it was when it burst onto my feeder with “the seam of skin and scales.”)

(I’m going to capitalize Nice Guys, but skip the trademark henceforth, because it’s annoying.)

The term Nice Guy shows up a lot on the feminist blogosphere, and there is a certain amount of confusion about what it means. It’s not just that new readers show up and need a primer; it’s that people occasionally take it in overly subjective directions. (In addition, the suggestions I’ve read for how Nice Guys should behave are mawkish and unreflective.) Nonetheless, I bet that it will not only survive online, but migrate offline into the vernacular. It simply describes a certain kind of awkward and contradictory Western masculinity too well. The craigslist post that LittleLight pointed to is now a broken link. When it was working, it was a nasty letter from a guy to some woman he apparently helped home when she was drunk. The guy railed at her for being indifferent to his services, for having no sexual interest in him, and for having gotten so drunk in the first place. Strangely enough, he announced that had he been a “Bad Boy,” she would have had lots of sex with him. LittleLight writes:

Were you ever, even for a brief, stupid, youthful period, a Nice Guy(tm)? How did you get over it? What do you think would work toward nipping this stuff in the bud when it comes to teaching our young men not to slip down that slope?

Arguably, my answer to this question is “yes,” although “brief” doesn’t fit. Nice Guys are guys whose approach to women is a mixture of fear, passivity, eager interest, deference, and misogyny. According to them, their whole worldview has been invalidated by a lack of girlfriends, and their basic attitude tends to go like this:

I’m a decent person. I should have a girlfriend by now; I want one very badly, and I do all the things women say they want. I’m extremely respectful and I believe in good conversation and gender equality. However, women clearly do not find respectful conversational partners sexy, which makes them hypocrites, and proves that I need to re-think the way I act around them.

I’ve wanted to write a post about this phenomenon for awhile. Like my Buffy post, it’s going to step on the toes of my upcoming sexuality posts, planned for August. C‘est la vie.

Nice Guys start out as guys with no confidence. Confidence is one of those terms, like intelligence, that gets used in mystifying ways; I mean that, aside from family and a small group of friends, Nice Guys believe that most people will find them unlikable and boring. They believe this because of how they failed on the playground and at school, and the reasons they failed are bad reasons, as is the fact that such painful “failure” is possible at all. Some Nice Guys are disabled or unattractive. Some are nerds. Some are minorities. Some are naturally shy. Some are young. Some simply went through a bad move or series of moves. At first, they got treated badly by a lot of other guys. Most Nice Guys I’ve met have a very specific relationship, not (at first) to Bad Boys, but rather to Golden Boys, the athletic and popular kids who seemed to get friends, girlfriends, and status the way you get presents at Christmas. At colleges where some of the population joins fraternities and sororities, and some does not, this crystallizes as hatred of “frat boys,” and as the phenomenon of toadying within frats.

Once Nice Guys reach puberty, a bunch of things happen at once. First of all, they discover porn, which is full of fairy tales about adventures (and “kinds of women”) that could and should somehow come true. Through this, through discussions with friends, and through the movies, they catch a glimpse of what is supposedly happening for the Golden Boys. It’s not just about sex — they want girlfriends. It’s not just an overheated wrong guess — they really are staying virgins while other guys awkwardly start rounding the bases. At a certain point, the Nice Guy suddenly decides that middle school is over, the Golden Boy image is attainable with practice and money, and they should get back in the ring and try to reverse the judgement of early childhood. Suddenly, they start talking about “alpha males” while simultaneously calling “frat boys” assholes. Part of the reason Nice Guys earned their name is that they call themselves “nice guys,” because they’re obsessed with the saying “nice guys finish last.”

Meanwhile, the Nice Guy is forming relationships with women that are something else entirely. They’re not sexual relationships, they’re friendships. The guy spends a lot of time talking to his female friends — a mixture of women he takes for granted, one of whom is guaranteed to have a crush on him, and women he secretly likes — and hears a lot about sexual relationships that aren’t working out, and about crushes, and about the rest of their lives. These friendships are astonishingly earnest; for everybody involved, a lot is painfully vulnerable, and a lot is scripted like a sweet film. His female friends share with him diary entries, favorite records, dreams and ambitions, cigarettes. The Nice Guy comes out of this experience with a lot of respect for assertive, strong women, but that doesn’t fit with his new plan to turn into a domineering id.

That’s why Nice Guys and Men’s Rights Activists show up at feminist sites; they’re still troubled by everything about those friendships that was so rewarding, despite constant sexual frustration. They also want revenge — the horns of this dilemma produces tons of contradictory thinking. The Nice Guy is being pulled in one direction by his female friends, and in another direction by the thought of waking up one morning, Gregor Samsa in reverse, transformed into James Bond or Jim Morrison.

For now, that’s where we have to leave our Nice Guy, stuck between a busy but Platonic social existence, and a bunch of fantasies that can go very wrong indeed. (Little has been said about the homosocial and homoerotic aspects of Nice Guy masculinity. It’s all there in A Separate Peace. Nice Guys have cannibalistic crushes on Golden Boys, for example, despite being usually straight.) LittleLight asked how we could keep our young men from that slippery slope. That’s putting it in a too-fatherly way; still, here are a few thoughts.

First of all, Nice Guys feel lonely, but the truth is that they’re not nearly lonely enough. They rarely spend enough time introspecting about what they really want, what they like and dislike, and what interests they care to pursue. As a result, they’re not very challenging in conversation. They’re followers, and that’s boring. They also imagine that they can only be satisfied by the kind of woman who would go out with a Golden Boy, which often means chasing after women with whom they have little in common. Being undiscerning, they become corny, humorless, and weirdly anachronistic. Nice Guys, including the jerk from LittleLight’s post, can suddenly start to wax about finding “a lady” in these fallen times.

Second, the fundamental assumption of a Nice Guy — I want a girlfriend — just isn’t true a lot of the time. Everybody values privacy and freedom, and Nice Guys value it even more because it’s mostly what they know. A lot of the panic Nice Guys feel when they do get close to a kiss or a shag has to do with the perceived threat to their own habits. If I could send them all a copy of “I No Longer Know Anything,” by Trembling Blue Stars, I would do so tonight. A very good evening to you.

Do I only think what I did
Was a stupid thing because
I did not get what I wanted
Or would it have been no matter what?
What if something had happened?
Would I still have fallen apart?
What if?
Would you have pushed her right out of my heart?
Is there something I don’t want to face?
Might it not have been seen a mistake?
What if something had happened?

Was it over anyway?
Does she cast such a shadow
Because she hasn’t been followed yet?
Would she do so
If someone walked in her footsteps?
Am I right to feel such regret?

There Is No Such Thing As Intelligence

(x-posted to The Valve)

The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate.

We’ll have to start out by getting a bit technical. The adjectival form, “intelligent” (or “brilliant” or “smart” or etc.), has its uses. Intelligence, as we use the word, refers to the ability to do a good job at complex tasks that require a high degree of abstraction. Thus, a given piece of work can be intelligent if it successfully addresses a complex problem.

To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. For a long time now, intellectuals have been chipping away at the mythology of race and gender, while leaving the mythical quality of intelligence relatively untouched because they have too much invested in the hierarchies it produces.

I. Memory, speed reading, and vocabulary

Vocabulary is a sub-category of memory: how many words one can remember and use. Memory is a talent with a strange, ambivalent reception. On the one hand, people with good memories are considered blessed and provably intelligent. Professors who can cite difficult works of philosophy from memory are celebrated for doing so; undoubtedly, part of the reason Harold Bloom rarely bothers to cite his quotations is that doing so would undermine his claim to have it all memorized. The phenomenon of memory is often linked to speed reading, as it is with Bloom: Bill Clinton was also renowned for his ability to read enormous quantities of books each day and remember everything, while still fulfilling his Presidential duties. Popular culture attributes far more to memory than it could ever enable. In the television show Heroes, a waitress with a photographic memory learns to speak flawless, unaccented Japanese by glancing at a phrasebook.

These mythic versions of the consumption of knowledge make it very difficult to remember that memory and reading speed both wax or wane according to the use we make of them. Every child who grows up in a culture with a strong oral tradition will have more “text” memorized than an average American child; Erasmus memorized more than professors do today; the Greeks knew Homer by heart. Reading speed depends on reading frequently, and reading for pleasure — a recent study found that people who habitually read for pleasure also read other texts faster. We may not even need to memorize text the way we did before, now that we live in an era of easily accessible archives, which means that the shape of memory itself will change to reflect a different cultural landscape. Unfortunately, there will be nobody there to track this shift, because we will continue to assume either an overall cultural decline, or the presence/absence of an inborn talent, reified by “geniuses” like Clinton and Bloom.

Whether or not we should be concerned about losing mnemotechnics is still in question. In the meantime, the cult of genius also produces a cult of mediocrity. In academia, a tradition that stretches back at least to Montaigne, and arguably to Plato’s Dialogues, valorizes the thinker with a fuzzy memory, who has to work hard and earnestly to make sense of texts that others find suspiciously easy. Rousseau calls his ideal pupil Emile mediocre, and separates him from the race of geniuses. Within the academy, this has produced excruciating overloads of citation (a serious problem throughout Montaigne’s Essays), and encouraged numbingly slow readings of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s bizarre institutional authority is largely constituted by the odd couple of academics who respect him, but don’t consider themselves smart enough to read him (thus letting themselves off the hook), and academics who read him, and feel that his brilliance makes it impossible to ever stop, or even pause, the process of doing so.

Outside the academy, the proud inability to remember has had its most contemptible exemplars in Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom have used it as a way of evading political responsibility, justifying smoke-and-mirrors systems of favoritism and delegation, and communicating folksiness.

The link between vocabulary and intelligence produces all kinds of cognitive dissonance. I’m not suggesting that a large vocabulary is bad — it is plainly a useful tool. However, nobody nowadays would assert that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a more intelligent writer than Ernest Hemingway, despite the fact that Fitzgerald clearly has a larger vocabulary. Hemingway compensated for this impoverishment by using rhythm and repetition to create complex effects with simple materials. The difference between them was a difference of privilege: Hemingway had not gone to Princeton. Privilege is a good word for the triptych of erudition, vocabulary, and standardized usage that is treated as synonymous with complexity; in an earlier post at The Kugelmass Episodes, I argued for the complexity and sense of valley girl talk, hip-hop, and the “broken” speech of anxiety. The more that critics develop ways of reading silences, stutters, inversions, fragmented words, slang, abject or undignified erudition, and so on — all of which, by no coincidence, one needs in order to read Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, or Langston Hughes — the better they’ll be at breaking down linguistic privilege, at which point “intelligence” will suddenly be visible everywhere, not just in the golden hallways of genius, and not just as a vague democratic assumption.

II. Cash Versus Context

It’s worth remembering that one of the most famous prodigies in Western Civilization, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was born into a culture well-prepared to celebrate genius as a species of the grotesque. Mozart’s youth was shaped by the experience of performing his prodigy in order to make his father money, and that continues to be the role of intelligence today. It is a commodified form of intellectual labor, and as such we have come to believe that it can be exchanged anywhere, just like the sweat of one’s brow: if a student does well on standardized tests, then we assume they will succeed in the adult world of skilled labor.

The effects of this belief in abstracted “intelligence” have been so widespread and pernicious that one hardly knows where to begin. Ironically, “intelligence” has made it harder to evaluate whether or not given pieces of work are in fact intelligent in context, and has contributed greatly to dehumanization. The problem of dehumanization is the insoluble problem of realizing one’s intelligence; the problem of judging the intelligence of a work is a problem of the desire for intelligence to inhere in an author.

To begin with realizing intelligence: everybody knows that an intelligent person will get nowhere unless they’re also willing to work hard. In Woody Allen’s film Match Point, Chris Wilton announces that, of course, “hard work is mandatory,” before going on to call privilege a matter of luck. Mandatory is the right word, since every employee and student knows that one must not only work hard, but also appear to be doing so. In fact, it is quite possible to have an easy time fulfilling one’s duties, at least on a given day, but ease is insulting.

Still, let’s grant that a lot of effort is usually required to produce excellent work, regardless of the field. Then we run into the problem of wasted effort: the person who works furiously, but produces mediocre or frankly awful work. In these cases, a supposed lack of intelligence or talent is frequently the alibi for the work ethic itself. How many of these casualties of effort fail precisely because of over-work and fatigue? How many fail because the drudgery of innumerable small and laborious acts, on which another person might discreetly renege, prevents them from doing synthetic and innovative thinking? In business, one tries to compensate by encouraging a “culture of innovation,” but this is fraught with danger. It undermines espirit de corps, and it actually heightens alienation, since one’s ideas tend to become other people’s property.

The relationship between innovation, which requires independence of thought, and manageability, which requires conformism and respect for authority, is not a dialectical relationship. The two modes do not immanently “contain” one another; they sit together uncomfortably, each sapping the other’s strength, with “intelligence + hard work” as the magic formula that is supposed to reconcile them.

To borrow Derrida’s phrase about clinical madness, there is a “terribly trivial” sense in which a given person may not be able to master a given situation: brain damage, developmental disability, physical disability. I call this trivial because all of the most progressive advances in our approach to these impairments and disabilities have involved abandoning assumptions about intelligence. Until very recently, autistic persons were classed as mental deficients. Only recently has it become clear the extent to which developmentally disabled persons can be integrated into “normal” classrooms, hired for paying jobs, and generally accomodated on an individual basis rather than marginalized by evaluations of “intelligence.”

And what of personality? Introversion and extroversion produce different kinds of intelligence. Intelligence is molded by persistent anxiety or its absence, and by tendencies toward manic/depression, schizophrenia, or autism (i.e. Asperger’s). As a result, some of the best critiques of psychiatry and socialization have been made in the name of genius. Sadly, this is a trap. It accepts that difference has to immediately prove, via intelligence and “genius,” measurable social utility, and thus re-affirms the total domination of the social over the individual. It also opens the door for correcting difference whenever it “goes too far” — that is, when a given asocial or abnormal state stops being immediately profitable. Lastly, as little as the defense of introversion has done for actual introverts, it has helped sustain the myth of superficial extroversion. That means fashion, socializing — the extroverted feminine, which lacks the right to create hierarchies of intelligence, except under the ban of severe moral judgement (as cunning, for example).

Standardized tests, IQ tests, and their ilk have been subject to criticism for a long time now. It’s reached the point where every schoolchild knows that the SAT only measures “how good you are at taking tests,” and yet nobody really challenges the role of SAT tests in college admissions. In fact, the SAT isn’t that simplistically useless, but the fact that standardized testing is on the rise (thanks to No Child Left Behind), despite the popular wisdom about such tests, should alert us to the fact that “teaching to the test” is not a side effect of standardized testing, but its real mission. The cynicism of test-takers, like the cynicism of consumers, reinforces the system it seems to oppose. It is fundamentally shallow cynicism, overmatched by an awe of the test through which all the old myths survive. In the film Spellbound, the family members and teachers of the children competing in the National Spelling Bee ascribe their charges’ success to — depending on the child — their own love of puns, meditation, the love of Jesus Christ, the child’s well-rounded existence (“He’s not like those other kids, he has a life,” one sister says), ethnicity, and/or the greatness of America. In other words, the adults are eager to cash in on this success for an affirmation of certain values, while the children focus on the basically mechanical task at hand, with a devastating awareness that all but one of them will lose.

The most famous response to the traditional theory of intelligence, Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” creates more problems than it solves. I’ve already implied that Gardner’s distinction between “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal” intelligences reverses cause and effect, by ascribing to an inborn talent what could just as easily be founded in inherited affects or the long practice of certain habits (e.g. solitary reading). Since so many professions involve ludicrous, specialty-coffee-like “blends” of intelligences (let’s see, a poet has some musical intelligence and some linguistic intelligence…), and since the distinctions between intelligences are quite tenuous (e.g. the difference between musical and mathematical intelligence), Gardner is mostly useful as an example of two things: our unified theory of intelligence beginning to unravel upon closer consideration, and our confusion between talent and right. Gardner clearly wants intelligences to be recognized and respected, in order to give children greater freedom to utilize their talents. One wonders why those talents should be codified into an awkward and inadequate sevenfold system that has, in fact, already been supplemented by the laughable category of “nature intelligence,” possessed by gardeners and Charles Darwin.

III. The Problem of Premises

In the previous section, I alluded to the stereotype of the hard worker who accomplishes nothing, a problem we usually attribute to an inherent “unfittedness” or lack of talent. From there, I discussed the problems of innovation and independence, which opens a whole field for the investigation of passivity, resentment, timidity, socialization (particularly in its nastiest forms as silencing or dogma) and despair as contingent conditions that become naturalized in terms of a lack of aptitude. We might describe this as a substitution of the scale of intelligence for the social and psychological problem of freedom. Harold Bloom himself, in the face of his own failure to produce literature, wrote a classic study of psychological obstruction in The Anxiety of Influence.

The problem of innovation also gets at the problem of false premises, which may be the strongest argument for an attack on the cult of intelligence. For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air. Over at Sour Duck, Melinda Casino raised this very point with regard to blogging: earnest and awkward can work better as a style.

Nonetheless, even as they are charming us with a Socratic/Rousseauean show of plainness, we expect our authors to be brilliant, which is why most people still have such trouble comprehending the truisms about punk. The punks were not, all the way down the line, brilliant or geniuses. This was true by accident (Sid Vicious) and also by design. If you thought of yourself as a genius, you ended up like the people the punks hated, because being a musical genius meant thinking of music in terms of composition, rather than in terms of reception. The insular premise of virtuoso rock produced insular, useless music: noodling.

Noodling is a good word for the final casualty of false premises: the theory of intelligence as it is applied to political and philosophical debate. I discussed this topic at some length during the Valve book event on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?. As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence.

***

Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions (e.g. debate shows like Counterpoint, choreographed academic debates between “schools of thought”) and non-signifying refinements of craft (e.g. a certain kind of technical proficiency in music). It obscures the alternation between “innovating” and “doing one’s task well,” an alternation grounded in the contradictions of the modern economy, and one that produces real casualties on both sides: burnouts, drudges, exploited inventors, unemployed iconoclasts. It encourages irrational responses to radical work, by simultaneously putting authors on pedestals and, with a wistful “if I had more time…”, ignoring them. It condescends to madness, puts it to work without further questions, and warns it to walk a fine line. It subtly justifies anti-intellectualism, and creates its own set of simulacra — for example, the simulation of genius in the movies — which are preferable to the real thing, in part because the shrill protests of mediocrity always get a turn. It commodifies young learners and encourages complacent cynicism towards standardized tests. The concept of “intelligence” doesn’t help us accommodate disability, but rather encourages us to speculate wrongly about what a given disability really forecloses.

Once we recover from the genteel, congratulatory paralysis of brilliance, we’ll be able to see what tasks really summon us, and what darker obstacles lie behind the antagonism of Mozart and Salieri — his likeness — his brother!

Your Letters

I’m just not very happy with WordPress’s available templates, and, as you know, the fact that WordPress is having issues with widgets makes nothing easier. So, for right now, the books are gone, and instead we have this new minimalist layout that makes dynamite use of pink.

However, I can’t resist posting this complaint from alert reader S. S. (not really his initials): “May I suggest with all due emphasis that you return to the previous “Cutline” theme for your online weblog. While the new theme has an arguably snazzier name that would win top awards at the Early-Radiohead-song-titles-that-never-were awards, its I-am-a-computer-making-an-impressionist-blog-of-Portland-in-winter is far inferior to the clean Swiss graphic design I-am-the-lovechild-of-Wolfgang-Weingart-and-web-2.0 stylings of Cutline. There it lies, take it or leave it of course.”

I hope, by reprinting his very amusing words here, that I’ve managed to do both.

Please Let The Devil Write Both Halves Of The Movie

The devil rides with me again
He always says everything’s okay
Maybe I’m losing sleep over nothing
Maybe I’ll be just fine
-Beulah, “Me And Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore”

Today is International Women’s Day, so this will be (among other things) a Blog Against Sexism post, via the interesting sexist moralities of a few films I half-like.

Before we get to those films, I want to put in a word about two overtly sexist moments in pop culture. First of all, Marisa Cooper’s death on The O.C. I’ve mentioned this to a few friends: Marisa drinks, shoplifts, and has a lesbian affair, and her reward is to die. This is an overblown and frankly sadistic arc. The first season of the show was funny and frequently touching, and I championed it, but in retrospect her death is foreshadowed in disturbing ways. Ryan, the good kid from the bad part of town, picks her up and carries her to a bed when he finds her lying passed out on the sidewalk. Later in the first season, he picks her up off a Mexican street in Tijuana, when she’s passed out from a nearly lethal dose of alcohol and downers. In other words, several of their most romantic moments involve her being unconscious. Her frail, haute couture body now makes me uncomfortable, considering what happens to her and how nicely that corresponds to the recurrent strain of sublimated violence against women in the fashion industry.

Second, I hope that a great deal will be written trashing Black Snake Moan. The trailer made my physically ill. Unfortunately, not every piece of pop culture is a clever exposé about the way we live now; in other words, criticism can’t re-cast everything that comes to theaters near you as about the pathologies it represents. Sometimes the goal is just to be pathological, and to be hypocritical, and this bondage film for Puritans is a prime example. The idea of the film, in case you haven’t seen the trailer, is that a concerned man played by Samuel L. Jackson puts a metal chain around a nymphomaniac in her underwear until she learns to respect herself. He feels smug enough in the process to chirp about his steaks. Kudos to Justin Timberlake for being so clueless that he not only makes misogynistic music videos, he also picks “indie” films that show off the worst in art and human nature (cf. Alpha Dog in addition to this stinker).

Now for the rest:

The first two films, which are trashy films, are Cruel Intentions and The Devil Wears Prada. In both of these films, the first half is delightful, and the second half is excruciating. In the first half of the film, you have reckless, powerful characters enjoying themselves, and in the second half you have a painful fall that brings the film into harmony with the finest moral principles.

When Cruel Intentions was a different movie (a novel even) entitled Dangerous Liaisons, and it was set in the eighteenth century, it made a great deal of sense. The price for losing one’s virginity was very high, so the overexcited plot worked, particularly since flirtation and love among the gentry was a game in which the woman tried to return the man’s affections by not rejecting his advances completely, while still rejecting them enough not to be considered loose. Duels were common enough to make reasonable plot devices.

In Cruel Intentions, on the other hand, Sebastian gets killed in a car accident. He gets killed while acting nobly, but nonetheless it’s a grim deus ex machina for resolving the contradictions between his new love and his old wicked ways, one that tries (hopelessly) to compensate for the actual lack of moral retribution in the present. The whole second half of the film is weighed down with mopey introspection and dreary earnestness, and even the music is afflicted with wretchedness (a bland Counting Crows song).

ALL EYEZ ON SEXISM: In the first half of the film Sarah Michelle Gellar is a sexy bad girl making speeches about how she deserves as much pleasure as men. In the second half of the film, she’s an evil harpy who deserves to be ostracized and possibly given a noogie. In the first half of the film, Reese Witherspoon is an independent, sharp-tongued girl with all her wits intact. In the second half she’s a whiny tempest. Sebastian remains the hero, despite being as bad as his stepsister and robbing Reese of all her defiant individuality.

The Devil Wears Prada is just the same. In the first half of the film, we are treated to excellent speeches about the inevitability of the fashion industry, and its occasional rise to the heights of art. We are observe Andy’s spectacular transformation from mousy co-ed into intimidating New York fashion plate. In the second half of the film, all of Andy’s irritating friends, who have chosen idealistic paths like “consultant” and “yuppie chef,” start to berate her for joining “the dark side” and giving up on her values. Her boyfriend is particularly merciless, alternating between ranting, and twisting the knife with his brooding silences. This means that he clearly does not realize that:

a) We all remember when he was nothing more than the DJ in the video for “Crazy.”
b) He is actually a character borrowed from Coyote Ugly, which also follows this insane pattern of making us pay through the nose for ten minutes of pleasure.
c) For some reason, he is getting more points for making grilled cheese than his evil foil gets for knowing about Gertrude Stein and fetching Andy a manuscript copy of the new Harry Potter.

The characters try for a little realism by insisting that they just want Andy to be “honest,” but actually, since the film forces her to quit her job and go back to writing about janitorial unions, the real push is for almost total regression. Show me a film about a real labor strike, or even just something about working day shifts, and I’ll stand up and applaud. I really can’t be bothered to pat this one on the back for name-dropping liberal politics.

ALL EYEZ ON SEXISM: First of all, let’s have a big shout-out for the fact that the boyfriend gets to wear his boring T-shirts throughout the whole film, whereas Andy has to moult into a “glamazon.” Second, although the film shouts about the fact that Miranda Priestly is considered a bitch because she’s female, it also casts two mirror-figures (the French fashion editor, and Emily Blunt’s Emily) as classic bitches, and suggests that Andy should take an infinite amount of abuse from her co-worker while refusing to be promoted over her. In other words, against all odds, it insists on making Andy a nurturing figure.

***

In closing, let’s have a moment of silence for one mediocre film (A Beautiful Mind) and one good film (Good Will Hunting), both of which take a similar sort of wrong turn, except on the theme of genius instead of glamour. Instead of dancing on a bar and pouring drinks, or learning the value of Chanel boots, or seducing the therapist’s daughter, Will writes proofs on MIT blackboards, and John Nash follows pigeons around until he understands game theory.

Not only are these films subtly sexist, they manage to mix a sort of Pauline anti-intellectualism in with their sexism. Love! they preach, and the woman (who is smart, but not that smart) gets to be a sort of physical manifestation of love. In A Beautiful Mind this is done so badly that I just turn the film off when Nash starts to go crazy. In Good Will Hunting, though, the problem is a bit more obscure. The film seems to be all in favor of Will getting hired to do math, and of course it’s possible that at some point he does just that. However, a lot of the drama involves a fight between his two mentors about what kinds of things he should value most. Once again, the answer is love — the two things, love and intellectual work, are put at odds with each other. Skylar moves to California, but the jobs are in Boston. We see Will’s friend Morgan smiling, but the scene is misleading because Morgan thinks Will is cashing in on his “winning lottery ticket” (his smarts), whereas actually Will is going to see about a girl.

***

My point is this: rarely enough do we have the kind of good luck that lets us go see about somebody we love. Rarely enough do we get the chance to do meaningful, smart, creative work. Most of the fashion I see on the street depresses me, and I secretly believe it’s basically meant to depress me. Most of the bars I go to are dark, loud, and overpriced, and don’t play either “Unbelievable” or “One Way Or Another.” These films are about the supposedly dire consequences of bliss, but most of my days are the opposite: they are about the consequences of banality.

It’s easy to put the divide between low and high culture in terms of what’s fun, and what isn’t, but in my experience this tends to involve conveniently forgetting all the stuff about the mainstream that is about as much fun as getting a holiday lecture from some relative who’s worried about you. In other words, such films are divided into excess and remorse. Whereas the tingle of pleasure and dread that comes over you when a great movie begins never lets up; in such films, life is indivisible, and permeated by sweetness, regret, elegance, and pain.

Sir, That’s Not How It Works

Here’s a blog worth checking out: I Am Livid. I don’t have a perfect sense of the man and his manner yet — sometimes he comes across as just your ordinary grumpy wanker — but in his most recent post, which is a possibly true transcript of a phone call to the National Health Service, he is reaching for the dizzy heights of a Céline or a Jonathan Swift, and getting there. Or maybe the dizzy heights of a Chappelle.

Here’s a blog that has been on my blogroll for a while, but is really back on its feet thanks to an “energy healing.” It’s called The Oh Zone, and the newest post ends with a link to Tiga’s cover of the NIN song “Down In It.” You should probably download that song, and risk having miso get sued, because it brings back all those great memories from when industrial music was new and dirty and menacing, except it does it with the jaded-yet-nasal-yet-sensual vocals that everyone is doing now in imitation of Albarn (see also “Young Folks,” the song with whistling).

The key moment from Mr. Reznor:

Try to laugh about it now
But isn’t it funny how everything works out
“I guess the joke’s on me,” she said

I remember discovering, in my first year of grad school, the field of “object relations” psychoanalysis, which was invented by Melanie Klein. Klein would write these astonishing mini-plays with two characters, the Infant and the Object, where the Infant would say things like: “I hate you object. I will try to destroy you! I cannot destroy you! So now I love you, object.”

Obviously, infants are not thinking this. If you want to know what an infant is thinking, watch an episode of Teletubbies (Rueful hindsight: you should probably arrange to get paid for doing this, or else your friends will think you are very strange). Adults, however, do think this way about more abstract objects like ideals. In three lines, Reznor manages to sketch out a whole relationship in which the woman has made him cynical, and left them both bereft, because her cynicism was actually meant as a test similar to the Infant’s test of the Object. (This doesn’t have to be a heterosexual dynamic, or even a romantic one. In NIN it always is, in Tiga probably not, judging by his all-male call-and-response on “Hot in Herre.”) “Down In It” ends up being a story about a failed exorcism; Reznor comes to share her demons, and neither of them can manage a sincere laugh about it, with the repetition of “laugh…funny…joke” getting more and more disheartening.

There is some kind of subterranean sympathy, then, between miso ending the post with “Down In It,” and beginning with the actual account of an exorcism via the laying-on of hands, and the rising up of demons. The religious turn, and the placebo effect, are getting awfully close to one another: thanks, pantheistic self-help!

Finally, via Truly Outrageous, an analysis of Justin Timberlake by somebody in Florida, comparing him to Frank Sinatra. The style overlaps, quite deliberately, but I do object to this line: “ditching youth-oriented bands, embracing muscular pop.” First of all, Justin is not ditching the youth of America, and if Sinatra did so, it was a very mutual ditch. Second, you have to give Justin credit for using Timbaland, who is a certifiable genius and passably close to the cutting edge. Part of the appeal of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers was that it avoided the R&B influences that were crystallizing as the new rock sound, and I don’t like appeals made on that conservative basis.

It’s the wee small hours of the morning, so goodnight for now.