One-Way Street

Reproducibility and the Zara Jacket

FOTUS expresses herself through her outerwear. The messages, though, are ambiguous. She uses a fashion language the rest of us don't speak.

 This jacket seems to be one of her more explicit messages since she stepped off an airplane wearing Manolo stilletos while touring a flood.

Daily Mail reports that Melania Trump boarded her plane to Texas wearing a jacket that said on the back, "I really don't care, do u?"https://t.co/SeNGeux5jB pic.twitter.com/owHqTAyPdO

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) June 21, 2018

One consistent feature of Melania Trump's outwear style is that there's always something missing--human contact, generally. The Zara jacket is missing a pronoun. What doesn't she care about? Another consistent trope of her outwear is resistance--to contact with her husband, sometimes. Not to be too "Free Melania" about it, but we can't assume that she sees her mission to the border in the same way we do. It's possible her outwear has an audience of one. If that's the case, the rest of us are locked out, again.

Ambiguity of the image is fertile ground for reproducibility in the sense Benjamin outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as people try to reclaim meaning from the elites.

Got a new jacket this mornin' and whatnot. pic.twitter.com/A3ABo9S08r

— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) June 21, 2018

Reading the First Lady: FLOTUS and Her Sleeves

Slate's Christina Cauterucci reads Melania Trump's clothes, because that's all the meaning we can get out of her, for she does not speak. She is illegible, the Slovenian Sphinx. 

The slightly sinister beauty of inscrutable surfaces.

FLOTUS does not put her arms in her coat sleeves. She's not alone in this; other fashion-conscious women do the same. There's a name for it: shoulder-robing. But like almost everything else about her, in her shoulder-robing Melania Trump is both typical and atypical. Draping a coat over one's shoulders is practical if one wants to make a certain statement. Heavier coats tend to be more stylish, more conspicuously expensive, than light coats or sweaters. When it's too warm for a heavy coat, it's possible to show off an expensive coat by keeping the arms free so they can breathe. Impression made, problem solved.

At her husband's side but not fully present. The thought that never leaves her: don't let the coat fall off.

FLOTUS has responsibilities, however, as the wife of POTUS. All her actions are political, including speech. For her, shoulder-robing is a means of hoarding her language, of saying one thing and nothing more:

When Trump leaves her arms out of her sleeves, she’s telling us she doesn’t have to perform any of the daily manual tasks the rest of us do: She will never reach for anything in a cabinet, stoop to pick anything off the ground, hold open any doors, pour any glasses of water, lift her arms to fix her hair, or fish a credit card out of a purse. If she did, her coat would slip right off.

Melania Trump does not speak, she wears. Sometime she gestures, but as little as possible.

"Every gesture is a risk."

The President of Magical Thinking

From Michael Chabon's open letter to "our fellow Jews, in the United States, in Israel, and around the world."

The President has no filter, no self-control, you have told yourself. If he were an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan — we would know about it, by now. By now, he would surely have told us.

Yesterday, in a long and ragged off-the-cuff address to the press corps, President Trump told us.

Chabon lists a number of alibis Jews have created for Donald Trump--in effect, speaking for Trump, or rather around him, in order to create their own president. Every Trump supported I've ever talked to has done something very similar to what Chabon describes.  It has seemed to me that support for Donald Trump necessitates some form of magical thinking that some sort of different Trump will emerge when he's placed in the context of government. "He's not really X; he is really (or will become) Y."  Charlottesville revealed the possibility that only one group will ever see their magical thinking become real: the alt-right, the rag-tag, inchoate band of outsiders who seem to reflect Trump inner core of Id-fueled resentments.

Chabon urges his fellow Jews to realize the magical thinking about Trump wasn't limited to the public/real self dichotomy people have assigned to Trump. An even more dangerous part of the magical thinking is the dynamic Martin Niemöller first pointed out in regard to Hitler. The malevolence can't be contained. Chabon writes, 

First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing. You contributed to his campaign, you voted for him. You accepted positions on his staff and his councils. You entered into negotiations, cut deals, made contracts with him and his government.

Now he’s coming after you.

At this moment Chabon is speaking specifically to Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Sheldon Adelson and others who have offered material support to Trump.  One could add, of course, a long list of Republicans of all stripes to this list. Despite the "open" letter, Chabon is using insider language to appeal to insiders. Toward the end of his letter Chabon switches from address a public who speaks to a demand to a small group of people who can act. Mnuchin and Cohn should resign. Adelson should stop donating money. The rest of us trapped in language, excluded from the sphere of political action, must be content with the same magical thinking that got Trump elected in the first place. Responsible men and women will enforce democratic norms to forge a reasonable Trump and contain the malevolence. 

The scariest thing is this may be our best chance.

An American Albert Speer Might Look a Lot Like Philip Johnson

Ian Volner laments how American culture has produced only one fascist with any real panache--Philip Johnson.

[I]n our present political moment, Johnson’s fascist flirtation makes an interesting case study. The most striking thing, for those overwhelmed by the sheer mediocrity of the “Alt-Right” and its camp followers, is how mediocre Johnson wasn’t: almost alone among his countrymen, Johnson carried off his noxious politics with style. Indeed, it was all about style.

via affidavit.culturalcounsel.com

Volner is joking, of course, when he favorably compares Johnson to arty European fascists such as Maurice Barrès, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Albert Speer. In the 1930's Johnson had a sketchily documented flirtation with Nazism. No one knows his exact involvement with German fascists. Rumors persisted for so long Johnson was obliged in later life to design a synagogue for free. Volner has no new information on that front. He suggests, however, if anybody would want to become  Donald Trump's personal architect, as Speer was for Hitler, or become the American Marinetti, that person would look a lot like Johnson.  

The Literature of Traumas to Come: The Novel in the Age of Trump

 

In the days leading up to the election last November, many people vowed if Donald Trump was elected they would emigrate to some genial and inconsequential place, Toronto or a Canada of the imagination, as if all they had to endure were toxic policies until our electoral system somehow rights itself. When I arrived at work on November 8th, the day after the presidential election, my boss greeted me, "Welcome to the first day in Trumpland!" I thought she was being ironic, but she wasn't. Not only had she enthusiastically voted for Trump, but so had several other of my co-workers. I was completely shocked. This is Chicago, I thought. The globalized economy provides our livelihoods. Sure, last summer I heard people I considered friends talk about how Clinton was just as bad as Trump, but once we learned the restless little hands of our future president liked to plunge themselves into women's private parts, I though the equivalency argument was put to rest. No one liked Clinton, but Trump would besmirch the office of the presidency. Agreed?

 

To this day I walk around my workplace and wonder, did that software developer vote for Trump? Is that executive still looking forward to a Trump presidency? Is that customer service person reading Brietbart News while waiting for the next call? Am I the only person who voted for Hillary Clinton? 

 

Actually, over 80% of voters in my town voted for her and she carried Illinois easily, so no, I'm not alone. Yet I have a new mindset, one similar to that Aleksandar Hemon first experienced while wandering the streets of Sarajevo in his youth. War had broken out in neighboring Croatia, but it seemed impossible for it to reach Sarajevo. Nevertheless, Hemon couldn't help spotting good places for a sniper to go to work. Hemon now recognizes those imaginings as the first stirrings of a "war mind" preparing itself for the trauma to come. 

 

The pre-war mind was still busy convincing itself that war is, must be, avoidable, because it simply didn't make sense — who would want war? I took my involuntary thoughts to be symptoms of a minor mental breakdown, and exerted myself to dismiss them [. . .] 

 

People asked me if I had known the war was coming — I did, I'd say, I just didn't know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated. I perceived and received information but could not process it and convert it into knowledge, because the mind could not accept the unimaginable, because I had no access to an alternative ontology.

For the Age of Trump Hemon wants a "split-mind literature" in which the deer hunters come looking for you. Remember when you first saw a plane slam into the World Trade Center? There should be a literature of that kind of trauma, the story of staring at 757's flying overhead and feeling uneasy. Trauma renders everything uncanny, but Hemon points out "the upside is that living with and in a mind where nothing appears normal or stable is the best antidote to normalization." When you're comfortable in your house, snug against your neighbors, imagination functions to smooth over the sharp edges that keep popping up. In this context conventional literature, as an art of the imagination, stamps the quotidian real as fixed, inevitable, as the normality we all crave. Trauma, however, interrupts the smooth flow of language and thwarts easy reconciliation with immediate circumstances. In the years to come literature should teach us to be alert to how our worst fears are, in fact, coming to pass. Then we can see a moment from the past as a harbinger of a future we have troubling imagining, such as a call from Hemon's mother from Sarajevo during the siege of 1992. "They're already shooting less than yesterday," she assured him.

A Data Visualization of One's Own

The 2016 election cast Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data: A Friendship in 52 Weeks of Data  in an entirely new light. Dear Data came out in September as polling data started to harden around Hillary Clinton's chances for the presidency. It was reassuring to see der Horror-Clown, as German newspapers referred to the Republican candidate, didn't seem to have much of a chance at the presidency. Even the Trump campaign expected to lose. Among the casualties of the stunning result was our faith in big data in general and its predictive efficacy in particular. By contrast, Dear Data testifies to the storytelling power of data when it is personal and concrete. Lupi and Posavec used very small data sets--the stuff of daily experience--and ingenious data visualization to create what they call a "personal documentary." Unlike, say, your Fitbit, their data visualizations are beautiful. They're drawn by hand on postcards, which they mailed to each other weekly. 

The first week Lupi and Posavec recorded how many times they checked the time. In "A Week of Clocks" Lupi, an Italian living in New York City, and the American-born Prosavec, who lives in London, tallied up how many times they looked at clocks. Lupi devised a symbolic system to capture why she checked the time. Prosevec drew radials to illustrate where she checked the time. Nothing earth-shattering was revealed in the exercise--really, what profound truths lurk in checking the time?--and the drawings are rather crude compared to what the authors will produce over the next 51 weeks. But their first subject hints at their larger project: to create a story of a self through data slices take over time. A narrative, after all, is change over time.

Like any good story, character is revealed Lupi's and Prosavec's data. With her tiny, precise symbols and keen attention to detail Lupi excels at examining intimate spaces. She inventories the closets in her Brooklyn apartment and compares the ratio of clothes she actually wears (a small share) to the clothes her boyfriend actually wears (every article in his closet). Early one morning, before any of her co-workers arrive for work, Lupi records the objects in every cubicle on her floor. Her co-workers must have been startled at the precision and stealth with which their workspaces were examined. We don't know for sure, but we find that Lupi sits only a few cubicles away from her boyfriend. How does that effect their relationship? Lupi doesn't say, letting the data speak for itself. 

Lupi is the more introspective of the authors, yet Posavec is the more personally revealing. For Lupi everything is data and she plunges right into it. Posavec approaches her data more warily, commenting more readily on her data gathering and visualizations. She is frank about her struggles to expand her design vocabulary while matching Lupi's craftsmanship. Posavec loves Brixton and cultivates a wide circle of friends throughout London. Her sociability leads to occasional gaps in data collection--the authors refer to them as "data voids"--such as when she's been out drinking with friends. It turns out Posavec likes to swear, greeting "A Week of Swearing" with "F*ck Yeah!!" She relishes the chance to count birds and small mammals (but no rats) in "A week of Urban Wildlife." One of the most effective data visualizations appears late in the book and not as part of a weekly assignment. Posavec bluntly charts the course of an argument and reconciliation with her husband over the apparent loss of her cellphone, which she uses to track her data for Dear Data.

This is one of several instances in which Lupi and Posavec confront uncomfortable truths about themselves. During the "Week of Compliments" Lupi discovers the asymmetry between the compliments she receives and the ones she gives out. Lupi's boyfriend worries, not for the first time, for her sanity after she spends six hours obsessively drawing every door she's touched that week, tagged with characteristically whimsical attributes such as "So heavy!" "Boyfriend opened it for me," and "I locked it!" After Posavec finds the length of her to do list remains the same over a week, she consoles herself by admitting she  "may as well stop worrying about getting everything done, because the list will never, ever, die." Posavec has to confess to (and draw) a data void that lasts an entire week when she forgets to track data for that week's assignment. Neither Lupi nor Posavec feels especially good about themselves at the end of "A Week of Envy."

Writing as someone who has been creating a lot of data visualizations lately--working, alas, in JavaScript and HTML rather than colored pencils and markers--I can appreciate how honest Lupi and Posavec are about their data. My experience has been corporate managers dislike, and won't believe, metrics that tell them what they don't want to hear. Also, big data is often quite narrow, nothing like the range of experience the authors track. At the same time, I'm awed by their inventiveness in rendering their lives in data. Over the year we see them grow as data visualizers and artists. Lupi's meticulous, symbolic style evolves to the point at which she seems more interested in her visualizations as an abstract work of art. At one point she looks to Kandinsky and Malevich for inspiration. More representational in her style, Posavec tinkers with her spirals to capture the way data moves, how it changes over time and through space. Her to-do list diagram is a good example. For another example see her map of walking through a crowd trying to smile at strangers--and growing grumpier with the effort.

"To draw is to remember," Lupi and Posavec remind us when their 52 weeks are up. They ask us to join in their project of tracking and visualizing our data. We create data all the time, now more than ever. If you have the Google Maps app on your cellphone Google is mapping your movements on a daily basis. It knows you took the train to work, drove to the grocery store or pool hall, and rode your bike to the park. Lupi and Posavec show us how to reclaim ownership of our own data--through drawings, of course--to make our data work for us rather than some corporation trying to sell us something. "It's not that hard" to they assure us. Perhaps not, but to draw it as beautifully and imaginatively as they do certainly is. 

Red Counties, Blue Counties, and the Pastoral Idyll

We've all seen the 2016 election results maps: isolated spots of blue surrounded by vast fields of red. If the blue spots look even smaller this year, it's because they are. Look at Illinois, for example. My home state went 55% for Hillary Clinton, yet her support is clustered in the Chicago metropolitan area, Peoria, the suburbs of St. Louis, the Quad Cities, and the college towns of Champaign-Urbana and Carbondale. The closer to a city center or a college classroom, the more likely voters will choose Democrats. Most of the state, though, is thoroughly red. Not coincidentally, most of the state is countryside. Yet these people voted for Donald Trump, a billionaire Manhattanite. How did that happen? 

One way to read the electoral map is through the history of the ancient clash between city and country. In The Country and the City Raymond Williams traces its origins to the earliest moments of the modern age, 16th-century England. At that time mercantile interests started working with rural landlords to fence off the open farmland and convert it to pastureland for sheep, initiating a process of rural depopulation that culminated in the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Thousands of farmers lost their way of life, but a new literary form, the pastoral idyll, was born. For Williams, the idyll obscured the social and economic changes threatening the yeoman farmers' way of life. 

Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted . . . to a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society.

The conflict between the country and the city changed considerably over the next three centuries, with literary genres appearing to track the changes. The Romantic "counter-pastoral" of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge recognized the loneliness and isolation of country life. Urban life was the domain of the novel. Loneliness was a prominent theme here, too, in the work  of Dickens, Hardy, Wells and Joyce, but it was a loneliness within diversity and competition rather than rural decay. 

From the city the countryside was sometimes a changeless Eden, sometimes a realm of ignorance and despair.  For farmers the city also had a dual face. It was the place in which men could find new brides--or fall into traps laid by prostitutes. Merchants bought their livestock and crops, and sometimes cheated them. Bankers loaned them money and lawyers took away their farms. The city was alluring and mysterious realm where an honest, ordinary man (or, occasionally, a woman) almost inevitably came to ruin. 

People in the urban blue patches in the Illinois map want gun control and Obamacare. Voters in the college town blue patches care about climate change and genderless bathrooms. For them, intractable bigotries and inexplicable fears of terrorist attacks lurk behind shuttered main streets and isolated farmhouses. What urbanite doesn't get a little uneasy stopping for gas in a small country town? Conversely, gun control makes little sense in the fields and woods of the red lands. A good country doctor is vastly preferable to the bureaucracy of Obamacare. Climate change is an abstract threat to people who live on far-away coasts.

The red counties voted for a man from the biggest city in the country because he knows how it's rigged against decent, ordinary people, and always has been.

The Rooting Hog King (or President)

Richard [III], as Shakespeare conceived him, was inwardly tormented by insecurity and rage, the consequences of a miserable, unloved childhood and a twisted spine that made people recoil at the sight of him. Haunted by self-loathing and a sense of his own ugliness — he is repeatedly likened to a boar or rooting hog — he found refuge in a feeling of entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for bullying.

From this psychopathology, the play suggests, emerged the character’s weird, obsessive determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude.

via www.nytimes.com

The conventional wisdom says Donald Trump is motivated by a pathological narcissism. By drawing a comparison to Shakespeare's Richard III, Stephen Greenblatt opens up a different way of seeing Trump, one that seems germane after the Access Hollywood tape revelations. The live mic caught Trump trying to impress an insignificant toady in the celebrity-fawning industry. Somewhere deep inside Trump there's a "bunchback'd toad," the "loathed issue of thy father's loins." Could this soliloquy be lurking inside?

There is no creature loves me,

And if I die no soul will pity me.

And wherefore should they, since that I myself

Find in myself no pity to myself?

 

Adorno on Trumpism

Watching Trump's stunningly dark acceptance speech last night, I got to wondering what Walter Benjamin would have thought of it. But then I thought of another, darker philosopher--Theodor Adorno. Here's a passage from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life in which Adorno seems to be talking about Trump and his followers at the same time. In the section "Simple Simon" Adorno asks what's happened to the individual in contemporary (he's writing in 1951) society. 

Since he no longer has an independent economic existence, his character begins to contradict his objective social role. 

This would describe a Trump follower, I think. Then Adorno goes on to describe a character like Trump:

The individualities imported into America, and divested on individuality in the process, are called colorful personalities. Their eager, uninhabited impulsiveness, their sudden fancies, their "originality," even if it be only a peculiar odiousness, even their garbled language, turn human qualities to account as a clown's costume.

And then Adorno explains how people become vulnerable to power:

Succumbing to the universal mechanisms of competition and having no other means of adaptation to the market and making good than their petrified otherness, they plunge passionately into the privilege of their self and so exaggerate themselves that the completely eradicate what they are taken for. They shrewdly flaunt their naivety, a quality. as they soon find out, much prized by those in power.

The Disintegration of Donald Trump

David Brooks close reads Donald Trump's speeches in order to assess if the candidate is becoming unhinged.

Trump’s verbal style has always been distinct. He doesn’t really speak in sentences or paragraphs. His speeches are punctuated by five- or six-word jabs that are sort of strung together by connections that can only be understood through chaos theory: “They want the wall … I dominated with the evangelicals … I won in a landslide … We can’t be the stupid people anymore.”

Brooks postulates that Trump's pathological narcissism is disintegrating his sense of self. 

It’s hard to know exactly what is going on in that brain, but science lends a clue. Psychologists wonder if narcissists are defined by extremely high self-esteem or by extremely low self-esteem that they are trying to mask. The current consensus seems to be that they are marked by unstable self-esteem. Their self-confidence can be both high and fragile, so they perceive ego threat all around.

Maybe as Trump has gotten more successful his estimation of what sort of adoration he deserves has increased while the outside criticism has gotten more pronounced. This combination is bound to leave his ego threat sensors permanently inflamed. So even if Candidate Trump is told to make a normal political point, Inner Boy Trump will hijack the microphone for another bout of resentful boasting.

Is Brooks right--will Trump become even more locked into an estranged self as election day approaches? Will his supporters even notice that "let Trump be Trump" means that Trump himself will atomize into an array of resentments?