One-Way Street

The Art of Wall Along the Mexican Border

Donald Trump is about to order the building of a wall along the US-Mexican border. As people who live in the borderlands already know, walls already exist on the border. They are mere artifacts among many others in the land where two cultures meet in conflict and reconciliation. The photographer Richard Misrach has been photographing the borderlands since 2004. Like a sort of desert flâneur, he's also been gathering artifacts of the contact zone, from discarded backpacks to shotgun shells, and turning them over to the composer Guillermo Galindo, who converted them into instruments. The story of this collaboration is told in Border Cantos, as well as an exhibition at the Crystal Bridges of American Art through April 27, 2017.

Inside Human Trafficking as a Video Game

The video game Inside is an allegory of late capitalism, according to Kyle McKenney. You play the part of a boy who must collect zombie bodies in order to cross a dehumanized landscape. The key to the game's allegorical form is that the boy drags a cartload of working class bodies under the gaze of white collar workers who have some degree of free will. McKenney argues the journey implicates its participants--including players--in the worldwide trafficking of migrant labor.

This sour, gloomy game is produced by Playdead, based in the supposedly happy nation of Denmark. 

Dishoom in Durham, North Carolina

Monica Byrne reports from a Dishoom dance party in Durham, North Carolina (actually, the morning after the party):

It’s a dance party of primarily Indian music, run and created by people of color, the children of immigrants. For those reasons alone, white gaze would dismiss it as fringe. But the party’s overwhelming popularity with all kinds of people signals just the opposite. When I was there, still dancing even though the dance floor was packed so tight I could barely move, all I could think was, This is not the fringe of US pop culture. This is anything but the fringe. This is the center.

via electricliterature.com

Dishoom is the creation of a Ranganathan Rajaram. The party features Bhangra music, itself a mix of Indian and Western pop styles. "Dishoom" is a Bollywood slang term for the sound a bullet makes. 

Here's a clip from last night!

Posted by Dishoom: A Bollywood/Bhangra Dance Party on Saturday, September 5, 2015

Rajaram's Bollywood imagery is aisn't so fringe in America, although for various reasons Bollywood films still don't get much screen space in American theaters. The event Byrne describes sounds interesting, but her fringe/center dichotomy is too crude. Dishoom seems more like an example of hybridity, a term from post-colonial studies that refers to the hybrid cultural forms that emerge when two cultural traditions come into contact with each other. Dishoom's high-energy mix of Desi and American pop appears in Durham because college towns are spaces that encourage cultural practices outside their original contexts--novelists twerking in nightclubs, for example. Durham isn't representative of American popular culture, but then again, neither is the small North Carolina town where Byrne grew up. The more you look for the center of American culture, the more fringes you find.

Charting Culture

Here is a data visualization that shows the propagation of European culture to the far corners of the globe.

The visualization looks like a chart for a nuclear war, with Europe launching warheads of cultural practices to its erstwhile colonies. There's no shooting back, either. Cultural practices aren't delivered back to the imperial centers.

Oversimplification is a hazard of data visualizations. It's main pedagogical point is made in the sudden explosion of cultural practices in the nineteenth century. As transformative as the Internet has been, in the context of European history it can't match the period between the birth of David Hume and the death of Sigmund Freud.

Vampires Vs. Zombies

David Castillo and William Egginton argue that the vampire is no longer a fully apt symbol for globalized capitalism. Since Karl Marx the vampire has been the symbol of capitalist exploitation, with the capitalist sucking the blood from the body of the worker. The allegory endures in part because the vampire’s deathless beauty corresponds to the preening attractiveness of the economic elites. 

 

The figure of the vampire is a product of the Gothic imagination and its fascination with the cycles of sin and punishment. A Gothic world view, however, still presumes some underlying and meaningful order to human affairs. The vampire eventually dies. What happens when the only imaginable end is apocalypse? What happens to those people who vampires can’t be bother with?

 

All over the world there are great masses of people who aspire to be the living bodies to be exploited. Millions are born who will never contribute anything to the global economy. As German philosopher Niklas Luhmann puts it, "there is nothing to exploit in the favelas."

 

Castillo and Egginton don’t suggest the unexploited masses are zombies. Rather, the unexploited masses are indicative of a deeper purposelessness to the globalized economy. The real zombies are us.

 

Zombies are both newer and older than vampires. Zombies didn’t enter American popular culture until George Romero’s  Night of the Living Dead (1968), but the idea that death comes in two parts—bodily and spiritual—pre-dates the Christian era. Sophocles’ Antigone is condemned to death, but her righteousness radiates long after her physical death. In her beauty and purposefulness, however, Antigone is the anti-zombie.  The modern zombie endures physical death, but the law requires a state of being the body can’t satisfy. The result, according to Castillo and Egginton, is a "monstrous excrescences driven on by a fundamental imbalance in the world of men.”

 

We exist between two deaths--Lacan called it entre deux morts--stumbling along, mindlessly consuming just so the whole global engine can keep producing wealth, leaving the masses outside the system to pick over the waste products. There’s no alternative to global capitalism, so the obligation to consume will never cease until the world itself comes to an end. 

 

I'm starting to think that the robots won't even need to take over.

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) October 27, 2014

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall, the godfather of multi-culturalism and coiner of the term "Thatcherism," has died at age 82. 

If you were a graduate student in cultural studies in the 1990s, he was everywhere. He was the first name on a series of collectively written or edited studies about literary and media culture. Hall was a sort of Che Guevara of the British university system, producing committed leftist work (he was the founding editor of the New Left Review) in sober prose. Hall and his collaborators seemed more serious, more materialist than the French theorists who dominated American cultural studies at the time.

In some ways, though, even though they wrote in English, their sociohistorical focus was set so narrowly on Britain that they didn't always translate well across the Atlantic. Hall was known for his writings on race, but in the U.S. he had a lot of competition. Hall's observations of the British class system provided fresher insights, but again they didn't always fit an American context so well. 

Nevertheless, there was never any question about Hall's authority on any topic he wrote on. And I heard several people say they wished more academics in the U.S. picked up on his work and adapted it to an American context. Too many people tried to be the American Jacques Derrida, and not enough tried to be the American Stuart Hall. By all accounts he was a generous teacher, a warm, supportive colleague, and a profound influence on a generation of scholars and critics in cultural studies. 

Retiring to McDonalds

The guy in the cubicle next to me is a few years away from retirement. He knows, to the day, how much longer he has. At least once a day he pops his head up and updates me on his retirement plans, which revolve around a golf cart. A couple of weeks ago he went on reconnaissance missions to McDonalds and Panera Bread because he noticed that seniors tend to gather in these places and socialize. He wanted to know if he could be one of those retired guys who kills an afternoon nursing a McCafé and shooting the breeze with old people he barely knows.

Michael Kimmelman did his own reconnaissance mission to a McDonalds in Queens, which is apparently Brooklyn for people on Social Security. He found a McDonalds habituated by older Korean men and asked, "But why that McDonald’s?" Channeling William H. Whyte, Kimmelman discovered that Korean men want to put on their jackets and walk a few blocks to the local McDonalds to chat with their friends and sip on a cup of coffee, for hours. They're harmless enough, but they drive McDonalds managers crazy.

But what's the alternative? The Korean bakery, where they used to hang out, closed. The library is too faraway and really more of a kids' space. There's a community center with a space sanctioned for retirees with a lot of time on their hands, but it's in a church basement and they have to take a bus to get there, but when you have no responsibilities yet no freedom, submitting to a bus schedule is tough to swallow. Besides, who can have an open conversation in a church basement, with God upstairs?

Kimmelman identifies the Flushing McDonalds (image above, from the New York Times story) where the Koreans gather is a NORC, a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, a term that makes it sound as if, like a cluster of mushrooms growing in an empty lot. old people flourish in conditions most other organisms would find inhospitable. But the McDonalds phenomenon, it seems to me, is more like a storytelling community in which, to use Walter Benjamin's terms, old men gather to exchange experiences that go something like this: even though I'm very far away from home, I have cheated death one more day.

And what did my cubicle neighbor discover? Panera Bread has a better class of old people. And more women.

Dale Carnegie and the Origins of the Self-Help Movement

Here's a recipe for success if you want to become a self-help guru: Break down your philosophy into a precept that is so simple that anyone can learn it--a billionaire, say, or a mass murderer. 

That recipe was mastered by Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People and the father of the self-help movement. Among the people influenced by his book were Lyndon B. Johnson, Jerry Rubin, Lee Iacocca, Warren Buffett, and Charles Manson. Carnegie taught that in order to get people to do what you want, make it seem like it was their idea. This is a handy concept to have for someone who wants to start a murderous cult.

In her review of Steven Watts’ biography, Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America, Laura Miller points out that Carnegie spoke to the anxieties of the elites in a changing world in the early twentieth centure. At that time America was transitioning from a largely rural society to an urban, industrialized one. The emergent mass, bureaucratized culture required both restraint and cunning. The reward for successfully navigating this culture was largely internal. Showy displays of wealth and other overt marks of status did one little good when dealing with a large, impersonal bureaucracy. To succeed in modern life, Carnegie taught, it was necessary to work well with other people. 

Many people have pointed out many problems with Carnegie's teachings, but the central problem is this: it's a short road from strategic cooperation to manipulative narcissism. 

Bookshelfies

Salon picked up on the Bookshelfie phenomenon, calling it "vanity for introverts," a snarky and inaccurate term. The Bookshelfie is a selfie with book covers. The format is simple. There's a self-portrait, taken with a camera phone, a brief commentary on the photograph, and a list of the books in the photograph. Sunglasses are optional, but highly recommended.

Here's a recent example:

Most of the Tumblr entries are by people in their twenties, often considered to be an age of solipsism. But I don't see solipsism or vanity in the Bookselfie.

By the time one reaches one's twenties one has pretty much ceased to be the sole subject of a photograph. Children tend to be photographed individually being themselves--or rather, being more than themselves. A prop or two may appear in the frame, but the child is usually the center of interest. 

As a person moves beyond the domestic sphere and enters the social realm, solo photographs disappear almost all together, to be replaced by photographs of the self with something, or more commonly, someone else. And once a person becomes a parent the likelihood that they will appear as the sole subject of a photograph goes down to almost zero. The more adult one becomes, the more they disappear into a swarm of images and words.

In the Bookselfie the subject still appears with something else. Instead of being captured, by chance, with other people, the Bookselfie is deliberately planned. This may be the source of the "vanity" the Salon editors saw. To me, the Bookselfie is an attempt to control one's own image, to choose with what they will appear. The Bookselfie makes the internal visible. Just as the photograph of a child marks a certain moment in time, in the development of a child, which every parent cherishes, the Bookselfie marks a moment in time: the progression of the mind.

Richard M. Nixon, Ratfucker-in-Chief

August 9 was the thirty-ninth anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation from the Presidency. To mark the occasion the New York Review of Books has reposted some of its Nixon coverage. Most interesting of the contributors is Garry Wills in his review of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's All the President’s Men. The review, "The Kingdom of Heaven," published June 13, 1974, appeared at a key moment in history: between the time that the facts about the Watergate scandal became evident as a whole narrative (except for Deep Throat) and Nixon's resignation. Missing from Wills' account are the terms guilt and innocence. Thanks to President Ford's pardon of Nixon later in 1974, there was no trial. So all we have is evidence.

Wills is always worth reading because of his non-polemical religious language. He casts the Nixon administration as "new Children of God" determined to remain separate, and above, the "other Washington" where Representatives pass out drunk on the floor of Congress. The narrative Wills sets up--here is where his prodigious learning comes in--is not of a fall from grace. Rather, it is an excess, a failure to realize when a crime is complete and, quite possibly, forever undetected. "Watergate is the story of a man who has just pulled off a million-dollar heist and gets caught when he hesitates to steal an apple off a passing vendor’s cart," Wills writes.

The cause of this blindness was the Nixon circle's antinomianism. "[P]recisely because one is not part of 'the world,'" Wills explains, "one can use the world’s worst weapons against it without being sullied. Indeed, one is obliged to do this, to protect the suffering saints who would otherwise be helpless before the world’s malevolence." Wills introduces another term to describe the Nixon administration's criminality. Wills calls Nixon the nation's "Ratfucker-in-Chief." The arresting term "ratfucker" originated, like Nixon himself, in Southern California. The term refers to the act of disrupting an opposing candidate's campaign, "getting the 'rats' all fucked up."

Once Wills has branded Nixon as a ratfucker and an "anti-politician," he brings up Woodward and Bernstein as classical reporters. Their investigative reporting for the Washington Post wasn't a counter-ratfucking enterprise. Wills is careful to point out that Woodward and Bernstein were innocents, sniffing out, like rats, "the sneaky little paths under out-of-the-way bushes" where the clues to the president's malfeasance lay hidden. The reporters had no political motivations whatsoever, Wills claims. Despite clues that Nixon himself was involved, Woodward and Bernstein refused to believe the president was involved until late in the investigation.

Watergate was a political scandal, but not a partisan one. Wills never uses the terms "Republican" or "Democrat." In Wills' account, the scandal unfolded at a higher plane of existence. In a sense, Watergate was the last political scandal involving an American president. The discourse that Wills had labeled as deviant in 1974 has now become standard in American politics. Today every whiff of impropriety leads directly to the White House. There's no time for investigations any more, only recriminations. The whole American political system is now antinomian.