One-Way Street

Towards an Ethical Architecture

Is it okay for an architect to design a building in a country ruled by an autocratic government? "It's complicated," Thom Mayne says. And indeed, it is. Daniel Libeskind recently denounced his fellow architects for working in China, and others have complained about Western architects aiding and abetting Dubai's building frenzy. If there's a conclusion to the debate outlined in Robin Pogrebin's New York Times article, it's that architects can accept commissions from autocratic countries if the end product expresses a popular longing for democracy. The building should not endorse or reflect the values of the autocratic regime itself.

All kinds of ambiguities emerge from this position, so it's worth consulting Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, a book I discussed at length earlier. Badiou argues that we only have an ethical obligation to the truth. He rejects ethical positions founded in adherence to abstract ethical law or respect for otherness as conformist at best and nihilistic at worst. Conventional ethics, Badiou says, merely flatter our own beliefs and preconceptions while treating the victims of evil with condensation, even contempt. You can see these attitudes in many recent discussions of the tremendous growth of developing world cities: essays on the new urban hypermasses are full of terrifying statistics and hand-wringing pity. "We're all in this together!" is the general refrain, but the squalor is always somewhere else, in less well-managed--and less virtuous--portions of the world. Meanwhile, in the West we're keeping our part of the planet tidy. We're buying hybrid SUVs; why can't they show the same self-restraint?

The essential divisiveness of conventional ethics is exactly what Badiou attacks. An ethics of truth involves compiling the concepts that speak to and for everyone, regardless of their interest, privilege, or national identity. In order for something to be true, it must be true for everyone. But preconceptions like the universality of human rights must also be put aside. The ideal of universal human rights, Badiou claims, begins with the assumption that people are victims. Life doesn't produce anything affirmative or new; it's merely the postponement of death.

Once we bracket human rights, respect for otherness and all the other idealist baggage, we can see our situation clearly as something unique. Badiou wants us to have fidelity to a situation and to its supplement, the event, which Badiou defines as a break with the past.  The event, Badiou writes, "punches a hole" in conventional knowledge. Not only does the true event disintegrate our preconceptions, it also creates us as subjects. We're no longer just bodies huddling under the protection of human rights. The ethical subject follows Lacan's injunction to keep going, to never give up on one's desire. This does not, however, mean a desire for a elegantly-designed building in some Asian generic city. Because Lacan argues that desire is something we can't ever fully know, consistency means never giving up on what one doesn't know about oneself.  One must leave behind one's own interests, which are shaped by our cultures, and give oneself up to future consequences.

What does this mean for an ethical architecture? After reading Badiou I would argue that simply holding oneself above mere politics is evasive. A more ethically truthful practice, one that's more oriented toward the real, is to consider each project as an event with unforeseen consequences. Jacques Herzog is closer to this position when he argues that his Olympic stadium in Beijing, designed with Pierre de Meuron, "will change radically — transform — the society." He asserts, "Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction."

Herzog and de Meuron earned a lot of money ($13 million, or thereabouts) for their Beijing stadium, and they had to undergo some humiliations to land the commission, so their position could be dismissed as a rationalization. And yet, by simply categorically refusing to build in countries that do not conform to some undefined standard of governmental behavior is to leave change to others, which is the same as denying that it will happen at all. Herzog makes an extravagant claim when he says  single building will radically transform a country of nearly a billion and a half souls. But drop a giant bird's nest in the ancient imperial capital and something is bound to happen, even if the result doesn't fully conform to the norms of universal human rights. Without engagement, nothing will change.

Talking about the Disasters to Come

This has been a strange week in my small world. It started with a cougar roaming around near my CTA stop and ended with an earthquake. In between was a series of computer code crashes and server failures and all-night conference calls and impatient managers to placate the next day. This week hasn't been anomalous. Since last August my family and I have experienced the worst thunderstorm in at least half a century, the worst winter in 20 years, the worst real estate market collapse in living memory, the highest gas prices in history, and potentially the worst recession in 15 years--or worse, an actual depression. Lakes big (Michigan) and small (our own Birch Lake in Wisconsin) are at historically low levels. Twenty-four Chicago schoolchildren have been killed so far this year.  Throw in the collapse of the Cubs, the White Sox the Bears, the Bulls and, quite possibly, Barack Obama's chances at the presidency (thanks a lot, Hillary! May you get 3 AM calls every night for the rest of your life) and one starts to think that we're in the midst of some slow-motion, multi-faceted disaster. As a friend said to me last night, "This whole area is on suicide watch."

If it's hard to find solutions to many of these problems (one problem has already been solved: the cougar was shot later that day by Chicago police), it helps to make grim remarks about them. In The Writing of the Disaster Maurice Blanchot points out that the French word for disaster, désastre, literally means "from the stars." Because disaster is something that is thrown down, like dice, from indifferent gods, it's neither a catastrophe nor a tragedy. Blanchot says disaster "dismisses all ideas of failure and success." It "impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity." If Walter Benjamin is right, impoverished experience (Erlebnis) can't be effectively narrated and made meaningful in a larger sense. Impoverished experience is one damn thing after another. Confronted with startlingly high prices at the gas pumps or a cougar stalking the streets, people complain or trade fact and speculation, but no coherent narratives emerge, at least none that can be told by ordinary people have to live through these experiences. Disasters big and small don't conform to our normal means of constructing cause and effect. They're outrages, pure and simple; they're monstrous provocations.

"This whole area is on suicide watch"--what a telling remark. It's a point at the beginning, or the end, or a story. It's also a bit of black humor, an ironic twist on a cliché doubly ironic in the context of a notorious suicide of a local resident. In its multiple meanings, the remark is a literary meme. Blanchot would call the remark "skeptical gaiety." He cites Levanas's assertion "Language is itself already skepticism" to make the claim that to write about a disaster is to practice a happy skepticism, to set in play the As If in the face of the menace of disaster. If we can't tell stories to console ourselves, we can play with language, spinning out pregnant metaphors, implying stories that won't ever be told. This play is a way to avoid just throwing up our hands and accepting fate, for there is no refuge in fatality. That would assume we're the intended victims of disaster. "The disaster is not our affair and has no regard for us; it is heedlessness unlimited," Blanchot writes.

Indulging in black humor may seem like a futile or inappropriate gesture, but Blanchot would see it as countering dreadful ambiguity with a playful, even hopeful ambiguity. Read enough news stories on the web and in print about a failing economy and a deteriorating environment and after a while you don't know what to think or how to feel. Figurative language, the kind largely banished from journalistic writing, interjects the possibility of feeling differently about how badly things are going. It opens up the possibility that no matter what happens, we will learn from the experience.

Deconstruction and Politics

A couple of days ago--I'm just catching up now after dealing with a work crisis and general exhaustion--Stanley Fish blogged about the politics of French theory, or more specifically, the American politicization of Jacques Derrida. In his weekly post Fish recalls the culture wars of 1980s and '90s academia, when deconstruction and various other imported theories were at their peak of prestige and influence--as well as the peak of the furious counter-reformation of conservatives such as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball.

I was a graduate student in literary and film studies during the peak of the culture wars.  Reading Derrida and the French theorists was exciting, but our understanding of them was piecemeal. With sixty freshman comp essays to grade and two seminar papers due, who had the time or the energy to puzzle through the entirety of Writing and Difference or Ecrits?  All we were looking for was some terms to describe what we saw all around us.

Deconstruction was irritatingly resistant to systemization or coherent summarization, but in its playful logic, at once anarchic and rational, seemed to be an antidote to the times. This was, after all, the post Reagan-Bush era, when the political fault lines we're now struggling to overcome were first being drawn.  The conservative revolution, with its evil blend of economic ruthlessness and religious cant, fit neatly into Derrida's deconstruction of essence and margin. Derrida gave us a decorous way to say our country was run by a band of greedy, callous assholes. Republicans may have had tax breaks and Fox News on their side, but we had language itself on ours. Foucault had taught us that language was out in front of action, so history, we hoped, was on our side. The problem, of course, was that one can't know ahead of time which language practice was in the lead, and which was trailing dreamily behind. Remember when it was cool to think that rap gave voice to the voiceless?

Stanley Fish, with Miltonian scorn, says that seminar room guerillas like me were deluded from the start. He cites Francois Cusset, author of the forthcoming French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press) to claim that Derrida was innocently deconstructing Rousseau when he was seized by impatient and vengeful American academics for their "bellicose drama" (Cusset's phrase). Fish shakes his head at American academic liberals on the hunt for pernicious logocentrisms and the even more vituperative conservatives who loved to hate them. "A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn't possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war," Fish writes. "Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences."

I don't suppose it matters much to point out that beginning with The Post Card Derrida himself took a decisive turn toward the political. "I have often had to insist on the fact that deconstruction is not a discursive or theoretical matter," he declares in that book, "but practico-political, and that it is always produced within what we call (rather summarily) institutional frameworks." Nor would it do much good to remind the famously stubborn Fish that he came to prominence during the era of high theory by creating a role for himself as deconstruction's dangerous supplement. But it is worth noting that the twilight of the conservative revolution, we're arguing again about centers and margins, reality and representations, ideology and praxis--all the topics we kicked around the seminar room in the 1990s.

Varda and the Time-Image

I've always thought that Dave Kehr had one of the most interesting jobs in film criticism.  In his current job, writing the weekly new DVDs column for the New York Times (I remember when he was a regular film critic for the Chicago Reader), Kehr gets to regularly revisit film history.  He works under certain constraints, such as he can't review a film if it is already been reviewed in the Times, but otherwise it's a dream job for somebody who is really interested in film history. I wonder if he gets to keep all of those boxed sets.

In any case, this week he returns to perhaps the most famous periods in recent film history:  the French New Wave. Criterion has just released a boxed set, 4 by Agnès Varda. The best known of the four is Cléo From 5 to 7 (1961). (The others are La Pointe Courte (1954/1956), Le Bonheur (1964) and Vagabond (1985).) Filmed in real time, Cléo tells the story of 90 minutes in the life of a young pop singer who was waiting for lab report that will tell or whether or not she has cancer.

Although La Pointe Courte made her reputation as a cinéaste to be watched, Cléo was the means by which Varda began to rethink what it meant to be a female director. The plot of the film has a great deal of potential for melodrama, but rather than waiting for the news from the lab, we're distracted by the film's treatment of time.  Gilles Deleuze, the quirkiest and hardest to categorize of all the recent French philosophers, wrote two gnomic books on the cinema, Cinema 1: Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image.  In these books Deleuze argued that the cinema reflected a new way of understanding time.  In pre-modern times people used machines like clocks to measure the movement of time. In modernity, on the other hand, our sense of time comes out of the machines themselves. Because it is a machine that creates a temporal experience, the cinema is, for Deleuze, a philosophical instrument. Through its manipulation of story time, cinematic is a means by which we can better understand how we experience time in the modern world.  Specifically, it shows how our experience of time -- indeed, our experience of reality itself -- is mediated by technology.

During a rehearsal scene Varda plays directly with our perceptions of the differences between the world we call the real and the world created by the cinema. We watch as Cléo tries out some new songs. We hear her voice in diegetic space--that is, as if we were actually sitting in the room with her. Then an orchestra appears out of nowhere, literally, and Cléo's voice itself begins to sound recorded, even as it's coming from her mouth. This transition from the diegetic to the non-diegetic is a staple of the musical, but it's weirdly out of place from a hyperrealistic film. Just as were getting used to film as a passive recording device, the film eludes our primary identification and starts to take a life of its own.

We're left to ask, who's really in charge of this whole production?  Suddenly auteurist mastery runs smack into filmic cliché. We can imagine a cigar-chomping male studio head demanding that Cléo's rather thin pop voice get some support from a lush orchestra--aesthetic designs of the film be damned. This is about as good as an allegory of female filmmaking in the late studio era as we are likely to see.

Blackout: A Ghost Story

Kelefa Sanneh reports that Britney Spears' new album Blackout arrives in record stores "as something of a mystery." Spears has been uncharacteristically reticent about its release; typically the publicity machine gets clogged with Britneyisms immediately before the release of a new CD from her. But Sanneh also implies that Spears herself may not be entirely present in her own album. He writes, "she has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that 'Blackout' is really hers, or really her."  Spears is missing from her own comeback album.

Spears' absence from Blackout shouldn't be so mysterious, considering how she's given up her day job as a pop singer and dedicated herself to selling her own image. The story of her recent career is a set of images--"The unworn unmentionables, the bobbled baby, the hewn hair, the umbrella attack, the loose lip-syncing, the benders and fender-benders," as Sanneh helpfully summarizes--that have become separated from her original incarnation as a singer. She has become a spectacle packaged and sold as a spectacle. Now that she's ostensibly returning to her material practice of producing music recordings, she appears as a kind of ghost. Sanneh notes that Spears's thin singing voice floats free of anything we would normally associate with a singing body. "Even when not buried in electronics," he writes, "her distinctive singing voice sounds unusually vague, and sometimes it's hard to be sure it's hers."

In Spectres of Marx, his reading of Marx's Capital as a kind of ghost story, Derrida reminds us that in Marx's view  the commodity is a specter, a fetishized object that is really nothing, just something determined by its exchange value, a "phenomenological 'conjuring trick,'" as Derrida puts it. We can try to sweep away all of the extraneous stuff from the object to see it as a thing produced by real people, but it's still a commodity. We can't return to its original state. Instead, Derrida says, we only get a substitute, an "artificial body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit, one might say a ghost of the ghost." In Spears' case, Sanneh concludes, "Ubiquitous, one way or another, for almost a decade, Ms. Spears has finally managed to become a spectral presence — on her own album." In other words, Spears isn't behaving like a self-destructive tabloid princess. Rather, she's behaving like a commodity.

It is the fate of all fetishized objects to become phantasmal, to become specters, mouths that say nothing, bodies without substance. No wonder the album is called Blackout.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

Marginalia

Is it OK to write in a book? Death to those who write in library books, but I say if you own it, scribble in it. Tribune writer Patrick T. Reardon is too "persnickety" to do it, but even a ruthless reader like Tyler Cowen is reluctant to write in books. He explains, "I wish to discover new ideas -- and not just my old ideas -- each time I open them up." Fair enough, although I would ask him how the old ideas come to be without writing them down someplace.

I write in books all the time, although rarely in novels, for some reason. My notes are generally pretty dunder-headed, just bland summaries. For the most part I'm just mapping out the text so I can quickly locate topics later. Here's a sample from a book I just started reading yesterday, Mark Poster's Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines: "M.E. [Middle East]--maintain autochthony of Islamic culture." I made this note partly to remember how to spell "autochthony," a word I like, and partly to situate the term "aberrant decoding," which may or may not come in handy later. At the top of the page I've written "Bert is evil," which means something in the context of Poster's text.

Or is it my text? Information Please is Poster's intellectual property, but the book is mine. I wouldn't have bought it if it didn't already contain something of mine. Marginalia is my way of appropriating pieces of texts that are objective correlatives to ideas rattling around in my head. There's a moment in Limited Inc in which Derrida realizes the degree to which someone else's text contains his (i.e., Derrida's) ideas. One day Derrida was reading a prepublication manuscript of John Searle's when Derrida noticed a copyright on a manuscript about Derrida's writings. The copyright reserved for John Searle all rights to a text about Jacques Derrida. Derrida retorted by deconstructing this little tidbit of marginalia to show that nobody owns a discourse, that copyright law ends when reading begins. In fact, Derrida's oeuvre can be read as an exercise in how marginalia comes to be more important than the main text, with Glas being the key book.

Besides the theoretical reasons, there are also practical reasons for writing in margins. It's a good way to keep yourself focused on a knotty text. (Similarly, I take notes--a form of marginal comments--in meetings because I'm bored.) Marginalia helps clarify what you think about something. And one of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school was to write all the time. Eventually something good will come out.

The Exception

The Danish writer Christian Jungersen's novel The Exception was a best seller in Europe, and it has the stripped-down prose and suspense elements one would expect in a popular genre novel. Less expected is Jungersen's fascination with the banalities of office politics. One couldn't imagine Jason Bourne, for example, in a slow burn over someone leaving the break room door open. Also unexpected are some rather long governmental reports on genocide and the nature of evil, but even these make for mostly interesting reading because Jungersen perfectly captures the dry yet urgent tone of the do-gooder bureaucrat.

The novel tells the story of four women who work in something called the D.C.I.G., or the Danish Center for Information on Genocide. Immersion in the details of mass murder would put anyone on edge, even when they work in a cozy office in the well-ordered capital of a small liberal state. This group of earnest and decent women seem to have been waiting for a reason to go at each other's throats, and when three of the four women receive threatening emails, the women appear outwardly calm, but inside they're completely unhinged. The director of the center reminds the women that advocacy groups like theirs receive threats all the time, but the women almost immediately begin to suspect each other. At first we're convinced they've lost their minds, that some Serbian thugs lurking in the dark streets of Copenhagen are much more likely suspects, but Jungersen's narrative discourse is insistent, and we come to suspect the women as well.

The narrative point of view shifts between the four women in free indirect style, so we know the women's suspicions are unfounded, and yet we also know that we're not getting the most personal thoughts of the characters. Getting caught in the same uncertainty and small-bore paranoia as the main characters can be irritating at times; one longs for an office skeptic, or at least for someone with a sense of humor. However, gradually Jungersen convinces us that the evil isn't some abstract and historically distant quality--surely the Nazis couldn't cast their spell on a Western democracy again--but something grounded in the everyday experience of presumably rational, educated people. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that Jungersen was suggesting that bourgeois identity itself is responsible for murderous impulses. That's how grim the novel's ethical sense turns out to be.

The turning point of the novel occurs when one of the women makes an informed and reasoned ethical choice (in the Kant's sense of the ethical, not Badiou's sense). However, the moment of moral clarity passes. The denouement follows soon afterward, and it's played out in the conventional thriller manner. At that point we learn the ultimate source of the evil, and it isn't entirely a surprise. The Exception isn't a riddle narrative like The Usual Suspects or Momento, so there's no pleasurable jolt of recognition, only a creepy and unsettling image of domestic tranquility in a small Copenhagen flat. In fact, in its grim, pessimistic way, the novel ends up as an amnesia narrative, with the truth lurking just below the surface of things. At the end, we're only ostensibly in a post-Srebrenica Europe. In a sense the final setting of the novel is Bonn, West Germany, circa 1957, when the Economic Miracle had showered high-quality consumer goods over the complacent and forgetful residents of the Bundesrepublik and everything seemed perfectly fine.

Caught in the Matrix of the Housing Bubble

Cult films are a distinctive feature of post-modern cinema. In an earlier post I argued that Napoleon Dynamite is a recent example of the phenomenon. One could list others, of course, but one in particular stands out: the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. The cult film phenomenon involves, among other things, appropriating a public text for private, yet still shared, means, sometimes far beyond what the original filmmakers may have envisioned. The Matrix has inspired all kinds of speculation on the nature of reality--some of it interesting, some of it silly. The filmmakers themselves supposedly based the series on a misreading of a philosopher with a cult following, Michel Foucault.

Now the Matrix as metaphysics idea has come full circle. John Tierney reports in today's New York Times on an Oxford philosophy professor named Nick Bostrom who argues there's a good chance that we may be living in a computer simulation. Tierney explains,

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

Bostrom's theory is unprovable, but Tierney goes so far as to claim he has a "gut feeling" there's a better than 20% chance that our world is just a computer simulation. I guess it takes a more sensitive gut to detect this possibility than the one I have, because my gut has no inkings about being trapped in a computer simulation.

It's probably just a coincidence that Tierney raises the virtual world question during a financial crisis in which vast sums of money were made based on the fiction that the housing market would expand well past Americans' means to pay for housing. Still, if one wants to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of reality, then this is the direction I'd head toward.

Although Foucault is well known for his musings on the constructed nature of reality, Jean Baudrillard is our most systematic theorist of simulated worlds. His most famous concept is the simulacrum, i.e., the endless repetition of copies with no originals. Contemporary culture, according to Baudrillard, consists of the free exchange of signs without any referents. In earlier stages of Western culture the place of the referent was occupied by nature--raw materials and direct industrial production (e.g., turning raw rubber into tires), as well as artisan and craft modes of production. Now cultural products refer to nothing more than the circulation of commodities in late capitalism.

The recent housing boom saw a new phenomenon: flipping a house. At one time a private home was a middle class person's last tie to a specific territory, a small, but very specific slice of nature. During the housing boom the home became just another commodity to be bought and sold on a global scale. The "California Dream" is now the LA housing market, where one's mortgage starts off as a signed contract but quickly ends up as a chit in some vast investment portfolio in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, or Tokyo. The tangible reality of the home, where Bachelard tells us houses our daydreams, is like the bodies suspended in liquid in The Matrix: just a husk, its intrinsic value is determined in some obscure and complex marketplace few people truly understand. Life in today's real estate market is a gut-wrenching experience that may very well account for the intuitive sense that somebody out there is controlling our lives, and doesn't really care what happens so long as the lindens pile up.

The Problem of Evil

In my last post I talked about Alain Badiou's ethic of truths as outlined in Ethics: An Inquiry into the Understanding of Evil. Now I'd like to look at his concept of evil, which is as unorthodox as his concept of the good. Devoting oneself to the unfolding of a truth is a good. Evil arises directly from the good, Badiou stresses. Conventional ethics begins with a notion of evil and from there tries to deduce a concept of the good. Evil is easier to imagine than the good, which is why the Christian tradition has focused so much on evil: it's more effective to inspire fidelity in people by frightening them with prohibitions and threats than it is to work out what one should actually do in a given situation.

Badiou identifies three forms of evil, all of which are deviations from the good. The first is simulacrum of the truth, i.e., an event that assumes the form of truth while lacking the "immortal" quality of truth. His example for this type of evil is Nazism. Nazi ideology seemed to be a radical break from received wisdom, and certainly it seized a lot of people, as the truth should do. However, the nationalist ideology of the Nazis was founded on a phony substance. The Nazis demanded fidelity to a closed, abstract set that was organized around a void called "the Jew," which, as a term for political (not to mention genocidal) action, "was a political creation of the Nazis." In effect, the Nazis had to invent a whole category of people in order to give substance to the false truth of the Aryan.

The second form of evil is the betrayal of a truth. Badiou's ethical maxim is "keep going!" Giving up on the truth, on one's desire, is therefore an evil. Badiou talks about a "fictional self" that one must use to maintain a balance between the call of the true (inventing a new form of music like Haydn or Schoenberg) and one's ordinary, everyday concerns, like grocery shopping and paying the electric bill. After the vividness of the event starts to wane, as it inevitably will, and the business of life presses its demands, "I am confronted with a pure choice between 'Keep going!' proposed by the ethic of this truth," Badious writes, "and the logic of the 'perseverance in being' of the mere mortal that I am." Fidelity to a truth, which is always never fully knowable, may leave you vulnerable to charges that you've lost your mind (Badiou admits "my fidelity may be terror exerted against myself"). But giving up means abandoning yourself to a series of unrelated wishes and unfathomable demands. Giving up means returning to the "service of goods," as Lacan put it.

Badiou calls the third form of evil "the unnameable." The good is a singular truth, not an absolute, which is why it's more precise to refer to "a truth" rather than "the truth." There's no overarching truth that encompasses everything, contrary to what religious fundamentalists like to claim. According to Badiou, there must always be something that lies outside a truth as we know it--and that elusive element is the Real. Again, Badiou is referring to Lacan's concept of the Real, which is something that both frustrates desire and changes it. The Real isn't necessarily an object; it's that slap in the face that forces you to change how you look at the world. Think of the scene about midway through Sleepless in Seattle in which Meg Ryan is about to approach Tom Hanks and his son as they play on a beach. She takes her first step toward them and she's nearly run over by a truck. The truck is the Lacanian Real. She retreats back to New York and nurses her desire before trying to meet him again. Her first attempt to meet him is premature, a false totalization. There are unresolved issues to work through before the truth of their initial contact can be revealed, but she can't know what the issues are until she learns more about what she really wants--the truth of her own desire.

Badiou cites the act of falling in love as a truth event.  In fact, it's the only commonplace experience he specifically designates as a source of a truth. Ethics is a short book that arose out of a specific event (a lecture series for French high school and college students), so Badiou has cut some corners, including specifying how we're supposed to recognize a truth. He acknowledges we can be deceived (see form of evil number one), but there's an unresolved tension between his claim that a truth announces itself in an event and the long process of unfolding the truth. Furthermore, his definitions of evil can be awkward. Do we really want to call a CPA evil when he neglects to upend all the rules of accounting? There are other questions as well: Can we maintain fidelity to multiple truths, say, one governing our love life and one our work life? Is the desire for a Corvette always stupid? What if it's part of some obscure truth? Badiou says the French Revolution was a truth event, but are there more mundane truths with which we can occupy ourselves while waiting for the next revolution to announce itself? Is there a truth in Java coding? In learning to ski? I guess these are all questions we need to answer according to an ethic of truth.

Keep Going!

We don't normally think of ethics as having anything to do with aesthetics, but ethical questions enter into our discussions about art all the time. One ethical issue is the proper subject matter of art (the portrayal of ethnicity and race in novels, for instance), and another is the ends to which we put art (the controversy some years ago over an oversized Richard Serra sculpture taking up too much of a government building plaza in New York City).

There's been a lot of discussion about the recent ethical turn in both our consideration of art and our politics. That's why it's worth looking at Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Inquiry into the Understanding of Evil. For Badiou, our only ethical imperative is fidelity to a truth. This is a radical, and very abstract, departure from the two generally accepted alternatives. First is the Kantian ethical imperative, which is indifferent to a particular situation. Ethical guidelines are written into the law itself, which we are compelled to follow, much like we're compelled to recognize beauty when we see it. The problem with this approach is that it's a lot easier to recognize evil than it is the good, and our encounters with other people have a tendency to be rooted in pity rather than transcendental law. The second alternative is an ethics founded upon respect for an other. This position is generally identified with Levinas and remains the dominant ethical foundation in the United States. For Badiou difference is a given; he wants an ethics based on something we have in common. Besides, in practice we respect otherness only when the other resembles us. Badiou dismisses both positions as ultimately conformist, even nihilistic. Basically, the unethical is anything that messes with our happiness. We suspect we don't deserve our happiness, but we're fiercely protective of it nevertheless. Furthermore, the ethical regime of the post-industrial West  is deeply conservative in its unwieldy combination of free market policies and dark imaginings of catastrophe.

Badiou is a Marxist of sorts, but until he starts dropping the name of the great French psychoanalyst, you wouldn't know he's also a Lacanian. For Lacan, we're made up of the laws of language and the history of our desires, and neither contains any absolute norms. They're outside of good and evil. For Badiou good and evil arise from the truth, which itself arises out an event. The event is a traumatic experience that "seizes" (Badiou uses that word a lot) us while punching a hole in received knowledge. Badiou doesn't throw out many examples of a truth emerging from an event, but one he offers is Schoenberg's invention of the twelve-tone scale, which he calls "a musical event." The truth grabs you and makes you into a true person rather than just somebody who is trying to get along in life. You are both fully yourself and something larger, and that larger something is a truth. To live ethically is a kind of religious calling, although Badiou would be horrified to read it described that way. Indeed, Ethics sometimes reads more like The Ecstacy of St. Teresa than a philosophical tract. We leave behind our particular interests and devote ourselves to the consequences, whatever they may be, of the truth. Badiou speaks of being "riven" by the truth, a division that he likens to the Lacanian concept of the unconscious.  The truth, like our desire, can never be fully known to us. In fact, Badiou cites Lacan's ethical maxim "do not give up on your desire" as the basis for our own ethical imperative.

When Lacan speaks of desire, he doesn't mean the desire for a Corvette or for the Cubs to win the World Series. Rather, desire is more like a mysterious and obsessive return to something we can't quite identify but we know we ignore at our own peril. Badiou's version of Lacan's ethical maxim is "keep going!" Badiou urges us not to give up on what we don't know about ourselves. We should remain in the grip of truth, even when we no longer feel caught up in the process of its unfolding. Don't give in to the temptation of returning to the commonly accepted, the ordinary, and the already known. In fact, slacking off from your pursuit of the truth is one form of evil, according to Badiou. I'll get to Badiou's definition of evil in my next post, which will come in a day or so.

Before I do, I should mention a couple of points one may want to keep in mind before delving into Badiou's notion of an ethic of truth. First, his ethics aren't situational. He's not much help in guiding us through the mundane ethical decisions we have to make every day. And Badiou doesn't offer much incentive for maintaining fidelity to the truth. The truth is its own reward. He denies his ethical philosophy is ascetic, but of course it is. "Is there a renunciation when a truth seizes me?" he wonders aloud. "Certainly not, since this seizure manifests itself by unequalled intensities of existence."  A life of Spinozan intellectual beatitude sounds positively monkish--Badiou at one point admits that truth is asocial--but as Lacan reminds us, even pleasure has its truth content.

Richard Rorty

Daniel Dennett once half-jokingly defined the word "Rorty" as "incorrigible."  Richard Rorty spent his career irritating people on both sides of the political spectrum, and now he's dead.  I have to say, as a personal note, that it is unnerving in an unidentifiable way that the major thinkers of my youth are now all dying. In the past couple of years we've lost Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, and now Rorty.

Rorty was a Nietzschean liberal like Foucault, but in a completely different way. He was an anti-foundationalist like Lyotard and all the major French thinkers of the post-war era, but he processed the Fröliche Wissenschaft through American Pragmatism. For purely idiosyncratic reasons having to do with the personalities of the people I knew who read Rorty, my direct exposure to Rorty has been very limited. I've dipped into Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and, more recently, read some of his book reviews and an essay or two. In my early reading in grad school I was a bit put off by his flippancy, and while Pragmatism has always been an appealing philosophy, I've always had the sense that it reached its fullest articulation in John Dewey, then never really developed from there. Maybe Rorty saw the same limitations. Toward the end of his career he became a professor of comparative literature. 

Rorty preferred that we read novels rather than philosophy books. Just as all science is becoming physics (with the possible exception of biology), everything else is literature. Besides the linguistic turn toward the literary later in his career, what I've always found intriguing about Rorty is the idea of a continental philosophy grounded in an American idiom. We're told that Derrida and Adorno are difficult to read because they're avoiding the performative contradiction, meaning you can't claim that language is never fully transparent while striving for total transparency in your writing. This may be so, but Derrida's and Adorno's styles are also the products of a specific setting within an upper education system with its own distinct history. Dewey's lesson for us is that philosophical discourse should be grounded in a particular type of experience, that consistency and self-identity aren't universal principles.  Rorty himself treated other philosophers as sources he could incorporate into his own thought, much like a novelist reads fiction in order to steal. In other words, Rorty took what he could use and tossed aside the rest. This isn't a good approach if one wants to pass a baccalauréat, but ultimately one will learn more about the world one inhabits.

Hitchens: God Won't Die, Dammit!

Last week there was a debate at the New York Public Library under the curious title "Is God Great?" Representing the case for the non-greatness of God was Christopher Hitchens, who just published the anti-religion tract God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Representing billions of believers worldwide was Rev. Al Sharpton, the preacher and civil rights bon vivant. Like many advocates whose passion derives primarily from anger, Hitchens is a formidable opponent in a debate. Sharpton managed to land a couple of punches, but Soren Kierkegaard would've swatted Hitchens like a fly.

Hitchins' thesis is pretty simple, and it rests on a stubborn common sense. The concept of God originated in a period of human history when people have no other means to explain natural phenomena, so it's illogical to continue to believe in God in a scientific age. But Michael Kingsley observes, "it sometimes seems as if existence is just one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God -- and not even the most important." What really irks Hitchens is the mayhem believers in God are causing throughout the world, from rioting over some cartoons in a Danish newspaper to using deceitful tactics to get Creationism taught in American public schools. One could add the legacy of Jerry Falwell to this dismal catalog.

One of Sharpton's main objections was that one cannot conflate the idea of God with the actions of some of his believers. Sharpton flashed his wit by reminding Hitchens that he subscribes to some misbegotten beliefs himself, declaring, "any man that at this point has faith that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has more faith than any religious person I know." However, Sharpton ran aground on the assertion that without the existence of God we couldn't make ethical decisions--that if God is dead, then everything is allowed. Slavoj Zizek likes to cite Lacan's inversion of this position: if God is dead, then nothing is permitted. We now have to make up our own minds, and there are prohibitions everywhere--"The Father, or worse" as Kafka had it. We're free to commit the sin of gluttony, but everywhere we turn there are warnings about how the food we eat will either make us fat or kill us, most likely both. One cannot order a Wendy's triple cheeseburger without a sense of shame that is more troublesome than the ire of a minister. It was a lot simpler when we had Leviticus to tell us what we could and couldn't eat.

It's unfortunate that Sharpton reverted to a very conventional view of the ethical, because it is in the ethical dimension that Hitchens' argument is really focused. There's no better crutch, no better alibi for one's own actions, than absolute authority. There is such a thing as the evil of excessive good. But Hitchens' insistence that God is somehow in the actions of his believers and in religious texts could readily be answered with Kierkegaard's radical desubstantialization of God, a repudiation of Hegel's "Spirit is a bone." In a journal entry Kierkegaard stated simply, God is "beyond the order of Being." Absurdity is written into the entire relationship with a divine other, which is why Either/Or, that testimony to human anguish, rings with the laughter of the gods.

(Thanks to Andrew for calling my attention to the Hitchens/Sharpton debate.)

Blogs in the Public Sphere

Yesterday's post on the decline of the traditional book review got me to thinking about the public sphere, a term I throw around a lot in this space without adequately defining what I mean by it. Also, I think it's worthwhile considering for a moment how blogs fit into the public sphere, especially now that the traditional print media and blogs are heading toward a cantankerous merger.

The concept of the public sphere arises out of our double articulation as subjects in a democratic state: we have a private self (oikos in the Greek) and a public self  (bios politikos, literally public life). In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence of the public sphere in the transformation of the village market, with its face-to-face transactions and localized economy, to the stock companies of the 1500's and 1600's. Global market enterprises like the East India Company needed state apparatuses (courts, navies, etc.) to support them, while the public demanded some sort of accountability from the trading companies. Thus, what had started off as a private transaction became a public interest. Newsletters started during this period as privileged communications between managers and investors, but the state, serving public interests, opened up the newsletters to public consumption, leading eventually to newspapers.

Other institutions of the public sphere developed as economic relations became more complex. In England, coffeehouses became gathering places of merchants, workers, and writers. In France, the more exclusive salons became a public forum for ideas. (The differences between the coffeehouses and the salons may account for the differences in British and French cultural life today.) The public that formed around the coffeehouses became the earliest audiences for public interest journals such as Addison and Steele's Tatler, which first appeared in 1709. These journals functioned much like blogs do now: dispensing personal opinions on politics and everyday life. By the end of the 18th century the function of the art critic arose, and a new self-consciousness developed in art, literature and philosophy. Through the figure of the critic, art became a matter of public discussion, and through the journals, middle class life itself became a subject of debate. Not coincidentally, this is also the period in which the novel emerged to make the most intimate reserves of the self a matter of public consumption, thus giving shape to the bourgeois subject.

In the 1800's, things got a lot messier. New interests and ideas emerged in the public sphere, but oftentimes they couldn't be reconciled with received interests, leading to the tyranny of dominant opinion. Figures as diverse as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx complained the hardening of opinion around established interests. Mill denounced the "yoke of public opinion" while Marx examined public opinion as false consciousness. During the 19th century a consumer culture arose. Consumer choice became a new basis of the private sphere; the other foundation was the newly constituted nuclear family segregated from the brutal competition of high capitalism. Consumption was at once a private family matter and the site of a "pure" individuality. Finally, in the political realm problems that we're familiar with now began to emerge, such as the discrepancy between election results and public opinion.

Maud Newton tells the story of Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis sneering at bloggers, "blog on, little honeybees, blog on." She retorts, "we have, thanks!" Richard Ford recently dismissed the typical literary blogger as "some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute." DeCurtis and Ford are clinging to established public sphere interests now under siege by bloggers who speak from the privatized realm of the cultural consumer. Traditionally, people were supposed to shut up and buy, but as the history of the public sphere teaches us, in order to be rational the public sphere must draw upon the private. As for the frequently-voiced complaint that bloggers are little more than exhibitionists, too idiosyncratic and self-indulgent to be taken seriously, Habermas reminds us that since the ancient Greeks "Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience." Hence, the blogger.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Slavoj Zizek has now starred in three films--the same number as James Dean. His latest starring role is in Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. The film's premise is that Zizek pops up in excerpts from Hitchcock and David Lynch films, offering us lectures on the role of fantasy in cinema. Zizek is one of the few major contemporary philosophers who makes the cinema a serious object of study. (Gilles Deleuze is another.) Zizek first rose to prominence as a Lacanian who argued that Jacques Lacan's basic ideas weren't that complicated, and to prove it, Zizek published an introduction to Lacan using Hitchcock entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan...But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. The book was an instant classic among film studies grad students who appreciated his manically flippant style and the audacity of his claim that it was possible to understand the ideas of "Chairman Jacques," as Sheldon Brivic, a Lacanian and a professor of mine, used to refer to him.

Zizek frequently calls himself an entertainer. He's been nicknamed the "Elvis of philosophy"--a name one suspects he gave himself. He has a weakness for toilet jokes--in reference to Hitchcock, of course--and the title of the Fiennes' documentary is typical of his blend of scatological humor and high theory. The cinema is perverted, Zizek claims, because it tells us what to desire but doesn't satisfy that desire. In Fiennes' film Zizek gets to satisfy at least one desire: to enter into a Hitchcock film, to escape voyeuristic immobility, "the intolerable condition of being trapped inside our own body, our own eye." By inserting himself into Vertigo and Rear Window Zizek becomes the blot that Hitchcock's heroes (especially Scottie in Vertigo) encounter. The blot is a "foreign body" creating a disturbance in the real and the social fabric of everyday culture. The blot "estranges and perverts its orderly background, which suddenly becomes filled with uncanny possibilities." In Pervert's Guide to Cinema our blot is a wisecracking, hyperactive Slovenian philosopher upsetting our normal viewing pleasure--and having a great time doing so. What could be more perverse, and more fun to watch?

Madness, History and Foucault

Recently a co-worker was chatting with a Frenchman about her trip to London. She remarked on the ubiquity of anti-French jokes in the British media. The Frenchman shook his head and said, "They never get tired of it."

The woman asked if it ever bothered the French that the British made fun of them so relentlessly. He shrugged and said, "What can you do? We try to make fun of them, but they just drown us out. At least we can take comfort in the knowledge that no matter how many jokes the British make about us, we always have the Belgians."

What better occasion for cross-Channel sniping than the reissue of a Michel Foucault book? In the Times Literary Supplement Andrew Scull reviews a new translation of Foucault's The History of Madness, first published in France in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The book, Foucault's second but the one that secured his reputation, is better known in the US as Madness and Civilization. The new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa contains the entire text of the first French edition, including the footnotes, over a thousand of them. Scull does some cross-checking of the footnotes, and what he finds "is not a pretty sight." Many of Foucault's primary sources were nineteenth-century histories of psychiatry found in a library in Uppsala, Sweden. Foucault did consult with some French archives, but evidently he was rather lax in his cross-checking. In any event, Foucault's data sample isn't up to professional historians' standards. Scull makes an allowance for comparative historians, who, "by the very ambitions they have set for themselves" are often forced "to rely to a substantial extent on the work of others." Nevertheless, Scull indicts Foucault on the quality of his historical research:

But the secondary sources on which Foucault repeatedly relies for the  most well-known portions of his text are so self-evidently dated and  inadequate to the task, and his own reading of them so often singularly  careless and inventive, that he must be taken to task.

And take him to task Scull does, picking out factual errors in Bedlam Hospital's policies regarding the public displays of patients and Foucault's "bizarre notion" (do the French have any other kinds of notions about the British?) regarding the conversion of monasteries into madhouses in Britain. Scull ends his review by suggesting Foucault's footnotes reveal someone who is "cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers."

Huzzah! Some research into the history of Foucault's reception in the English-speaking world would have revealed that Scull's revelations about Foucault's sometimes questionable research practices are old news, especially regarding Madness and Civilization. James Miller, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault, describes the book as "hard to follow . . . [Foucault's] own convictions more insinuated than argued." But as Miller reminds us, Foucault intended the book to be less a dry documentation of psychiatric practices throughout the ages than his magnum opus, his own Being and Nothingness. Foucault wasn't a historian in the conventional sense, or even a philosopher. Rather, he was concerning with "becoming what one was," and Folie et déraison was his first sustained attempt to become himself, which is why the book is such a tangle of concepts.

Foucault's most persuasive concepts (panopticism, madness as a social construct) have always rested on narrow historical documentation, yet they have resonated with readers because of their explanatory power in cultural analysis. He helps us understand how we live now. Those of us who have learned from Foucault--while keeping his limitations in mind, as any critical reader should do--read him because of the way he looks at his sources.  Foucault invites us to consider reversing some of the historical causalities more quotidian-minded historians leave unexamined. When Foucault claims the justice system exists to serve the penal system and not the other way around, one is obliged to think that claim over, but the claim is itself is far more illuminating and provocative than knowing that the public visitation of patients at Bedlam ceased in 1770, and did not continue into the nineteenth century, as Foucault asserted. What's important is that the patients went on display in the first place.

Jean Baudrillard est mort

I'm back from a brief and largely sleepless paternity leave, and I've got some catching up to do. First, there's the most important world event of the past week: the death of Jean Baudrillard, yet another French post-structuralist philosopher with a short life span. Among those who've come to spit on poor Baudrillard's grave is Robert Fulford, who eulogized the philosopher by remarking, "He could make any subject more obscure just by briefly visiting it." Fulford dusts off the old complaints about post-structuralist French thinkers, adding his own flourish of a martial metaphor. He accuses Baudrillard of being a member of the "platoon" of "postmodernists, post-structuralists, post-Marxists and full-time professional obscurantists," whose thoughts were weapons of war. Fulford notes with a shudder, "by the early 1990s their thoughts had penetrated Western Canada, where you could hear professors talking the ugly and mostly incomprehensible language of critical theory while students struggled pathetically to keep up."

Actually, Baudrillard was perhaps the most easily summarized of all of the French post-structuralists. The notion of hyperreality was his trademark idea--he really only had one good idea in his career--and it's a lot easier to understand than, say, the concept of irony. Baudrillard gave solace to young academics in over their heads by allowing them to declare whatever cultural phenomenon they were studying didn't really exist, so it was OK if they had nothing original or insightful to say about it.  Even Baudrillard's most famous adherents, Andy and Larry Wachowski, oversimplified his concept of hyperreality. After a screening of The Matrix Baudrillard sighed and said references to his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings.”

Baudrillard started his career as an orthodox Marxist and ended up a loose cannon provocateur.  In The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers he declared, "It is we who have wanted it. . . . Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalization that is itself immoral." He comes dangerously close to the pernicious idea that the people throwing themselves out of the burning towers somehow deserved their fate. Furthermore, objections to  the "immorality" of globalization are disingenuous coming from Baudrillard, an international intellectual and academic star, for "Jean Baudrillard" is also a product of globalization.

However, Baudrillard will be remembered for giving us terms to better describe the world around us, most famously, and usefully, the term "simulacra." Like Walter Benjamin, Baudrillard was interested in the impact of reproductive technologies on Western culture, and like Benjamin, he was more sanguine than most European philosopher. Baudrillard had a thing for the United States, proclaiming, "America is the original version of modernity," giving a twist to Hegel's dictum that modernity measures itself by its own standards by showing how America's idealism is a heady blend of reality and unreality. As for the French, one of the original architects of modernity, he shrugged, “We are a copy with subtitles.”

For all of his flashy post-modernisms, Baudrillard subscribed to the idea, dating back to Socrates, that received, uncritical opinion and the values based upon them were insubstantial and unreal without rigorous, and irritating, questioning. In 2005, at the height of the Bush administration's democracy crusade, he told the New York Times, "All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom." This explains the hostility of critics like Fulford, cursing the philosophers who dare to question our most cherished illusions.

Zizek and Baghdad Bob

This was such an obvious subject for him, it's a wonder that took him so long to get around to it. In the New York Times Slavoj Zizek talks about the wacky Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, known to chortling American military officers as Baghdad Bob. Zizek briefly trots out one of his favorite philosophical riffs, repeated in The Parallex View: the excessive desires of utterly clownish characters drive them to reveal hidden truths. Zizek even throws in a Marx Brothers quote (“Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?”) to make his point, as he is wont to do. From there Zizek proceeds to his next point in his idiosyncratic fashion, which tends to rely more on juxtaposition than rhetorical rigor--a method that can be stimulating, once you get used to it. At the same time, obeying some obscure Lacanian prohibition, he refuses to circle back to fill in the gaps, leaving a promising point frustratingly incomplete.

Anyway, in one particularly memorable outburst al-Sahhaf responded to a reporter who pointed out that American troops already controlled Baghdad by declaring, "They are not in control of anything — they don’t even control themselves!" Zizek argues that Baghdad Bob had inadvertently stumbled upon the truth of the American misadventure in Iraq: an out of control administration had exchanged an authoritarian regime for a totalitarian one. More adroit Cold War presidents used to be able to keep authoritarian regimes on a leash so they could bark menacingly at totalitarian Communist regimes. Now we have a totalitarian theocracy in Iraq, or at least the groundwork for one. The problem, Zizek suggests, is that the US isn't acting like the Roman Empire/global cop (the metaphors get confused) we're supposed to be. We're zooming around the world in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, carrying our own confused parochial notions about right and wrong. We're no longer able to assert a global order. Baghdad Bob was right after all: we still don't control Baghdad, and we can't resist the temptation to throw more troops into the maelstrom. We can't even take much pleasure in seeing Saddam Hussein swinging from the gallows.

Programmed to Be Free

In today's New York Times Science Times Dennis Overbye takes up the question those of us who bother to make new year's resolutions face: do I have the willpower to fulfill any of the goals I set for myself this year? The real question, Overbye suggests, is determining whether or not we have free will at all. Overbye reviews the current state of scientific research and concludes, "A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

Jean-Paul Sartre would probably do a lot of fist pounding in response to the bad faith of using the physical sciences to rationalize one's ethical choices. Yet Overbye paints a more nuanced picture of the state of our free wills. Science has shown that the means by which we make decisions are neither entirely random or determined. They're somehow magical, or at least we experience them that way. The explanation for the magic of human choice Overbye comes up with sounds vaguely Freudian. He cites Daniel C. Dennett who says we consciously control which urges we quash, and which ones we let fly, much like Freud said the ego acts as a gatekeeper. Our unconscious is structured like a computer program, albeit one of mind-boggling complexity. Your laptop has a set of predetermined instructions, but, as any close reader of Microsoft user interfaces can attest, the operating system has only an imperfect understanding of what it's doing at any given moment. The interaction between data, input, and software code constitutes the laptop's unconscious. The computer can't tell you how long it will take to boot up until it runs through all the computations. Similarly, we can't fully understand ourselves, so even though we may be fated by our genes (or whatever) to make a certain choice, the meaning of that choice can't be known until we act through it. And, if I understand the physicalist position correctly, we're free to construct the person who recognizes these choices as his or her own.

So we may be preprogrammed to make certain choices, but the math is so complicated no one will be able to sort it out.  One such elaborate math problem we experience is narrative. Narratives are both deterministic and contingent, especially genre narratives. In Time and Narrative Paul Ricœur argues that stories structure our experience of time. We know how the story begins, and we have a good idea of how it will end, but we still have to experience the story to know what it means. All the apparently random details of life get woven into coherence; its determination experienced as contingency. We know Othello is going to drive a knife into his heart at the end, but we still await each development in the plot as if it's happening for the first time.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the Public Intellectual

Conservatives have been complaining for years that there aren't enough conservatives in the college teaching ranks. My immediate response: be careful what you wish for.  I've never really thought of conservatives as being actively excluded from the academy; rather, the academy seems like a natural place for liberals. To take literature seriously and hold the life of the mind in some esteem while growing up in the Midwest is to place oneself immediately in opposition to the smug anti-intellectualism of the American heartland. The irony of being a bookish liberal in the Midwest is reading canonical writers--reading pretty much any novels except Stephen  King's--marks one as one part dangerous subversive to nine parts ridiculous nerd. I can still remember the taunts from conservative business and economics majors, "After you graduate you can come work in our factories."

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says conservatives have been excluded from the academy because traditionally intellectuals have been distinterested, magisterially  removed from the economic and political interests of their times. To point out that this has never really been the case is to miss Bauerlein's point: conservatives have been successfully linked with power and money by liberal polemicists. Consequently, they've been excluded from teaching freshman composition for less than what a kindergarten teacher makes. Bauerlein's larger point is that conservative thought has a respectable intellectual pedigree that has nothing to do with the ranting of the Fox provocateurs.

Bauerlein is certainly right about the intellectual integrity of the conservative tradition. However, the disinterestedness part still needs some work. Bauerlein speaks in (mostly) admiring terms about Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cult