Politics: My "Meh"-nifesto

A few days ago, Herman Berliner authored a brief post over at Inside Higher Ed about the complaints he occasionally receives as an administrator about faculty members who blog about politics.  Berliner has no trouble separating classroom performance from political belief:

Faculty are very smart individuals and there is no shortage of political (and other) opinions emanating from faculty. And often, I find that my opinion is different from and at times in total disagreement with positions taken by individual faculty. But it would be a bad use of my time and energy to confront opinions which faculty have every right to have. As an educator, I choose to focus on the educational forest, not the opinion trees.

Good for him.  Still, my decision to blog anonymously is at least in part motivated by my hesitation in having the things I write here associated with my professional identity.   In class I tend to keep my political and other beliefs from the students.  That seems proper to me, as well as rhetorically wise...because what if they've been raised to disagree with something I claim to believe?  That might cause them to turn off to any future lesson, regardless of its content.

I accomplish this near-neutrality by telling my students, usually early on in the semester (if not on the first day then the first time we discuss something overtly political or religious), that they shouldn't necessarily believe that I mean anything I say.  And, in fact, I often play devil's advocate or argue an issue from multiple, conflicting sides.  In my comp-rhet classes I'll even make deliberately flawed arguments designed so that my students can call me out, overcoming any automatic deference they might maintain towards my authority.

But the real reason I link to Berliner's post is not to occasion some meditation about partisanship and neutrality in the classroom context, but because I've been thinking of becoming more explicitly political in this context.  I waste a depressing amount of my time following American politics and reading the analyses of various commentators, and while it's not my intention to fashion this blog into one more surface for the echoes to bounce against, I thought some sort pronouncement of political convictions was in order.

To begin with, I'm not much in the way of a political scientist and I don't have any principled convictions about tax policy, deficits, interest rates or really any of that shit.  I guess I don't make enough money yet, or else I don't value enough the money I have.  I also don't have any principled preference for "big" or "small" government, except that it seems to me that any institution, large or small, that is too inflexible to adapt to changing circumstances will inevitably fall before them.  And it could probably go without saying that I don't think much of what is described as "left" and "right" in the US.  "Thinking" and "unthinking" would be a meaningful way to divide politicians for me, but it certainly doesn't map onto left and right.  Exhausting the usefulness of labels in politics, I probably see myself as a "left-libertarian" in the style of these guys.

I suffer from a few ideals, I suppose, though they are unfortunately the sort that tend to lack deep-pocketed advocacy.  I support civil liberties.  I think that the drug war is a shameful, murdering farce that empowers criminals (both federal and other) and fuels an ongoing multi-polar fire-fight on our own continent.  I wouldn't particularly mind if the US disbanded its army.  Also, it would be great if you could be an atheist in public and still get elected here.

But although there are occasional moments when the difference between is and ought causes me some pain, I also see myself first and foremost as a pragmatist and admire that characteristic when I rarely observe it in a politician.

Well, that's going to suffice for now.  Hardly a manifesto, and in fact, despite its brevity a little tiresome.  I promise that my next post will be more interesting.  I was planning on reviewing Tarkovsky's 1979 sci-fi thinker, The Stalker, but I just watched Alex Rivera's 2008 sci-fi thinker, Sleep Dealer, and I liked it and it feels a little bit more relevant, so I might do that first.

The Madmen Dialectic

The expelled are uprooted people who attempt to uproot everything around themselves, to establish roots.  They do it spontaneously, simply because they were expelled.  It is an almost vegetable process.  Perhaps one can observe it when one tries to transplant trees.  It can happen that the expelled becomes conscious of the vegetable, almost vegetative aspect of his exile; that he uncovers that the human being is not a tree; and that perhaps human dignity consists in not having roots--that a man first becomes a human being when he hacks off the vegetable roots that bind him.

--Vilem Flusser, "Exile and Creativity," trans. Erik Eisel

A few days ago over at the Valve, Scott Eric Kaufman posted a few thoughts on Mad Men, Matthew Weiner's multiple award-winning television drama set in the early 1960's.  According to Kaufman, the central conceit of the series is that the characters who staff the Sterling-Cooper ad agency "want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history--at least at first."  He then formulates a contrast between those characters who "learn to love and accept the modernity in their hearts"--thereby becoming us--and Don Draper who instead transcends (or perhaps merely fails to descend into) history--becoming art.

Something about SEK's analysis sounds a false note.  For one thing, It seems to me that the contrast between Draper and his contemporaries has become not more but less stark.  What made him so different at the start and what explained his "inscrutability" in the first season was not his literariness but rather his lack of essential identity (the two qualities are perhaps not mutually exclusive).  Like Hitchcock's mad north-by-northwest man, Roger O. Thornhill (What's the O stand for?), there was nothing at Draper's core...nothing to resist or belie the succession of masks he wore.  Though he appeared selfish, Draper was in fact only the other of others.    Each mask was like an advertisement, modelled on someone else's desire, loving the one it's with.  We alone bore witness to this infidelity to character--at least at first.

But over the course of the series we've watched Draper grow invested as a husband, father, and professional.  His brother commits suicide.  He wife discovers his cheating.  His company is bought out.  The effect of each of these cataclysms has been to draw him gradually into his body, to fill his empty center with stable priorities, to force him to take up permanent residence in particular masks.

At the same time, those characters who seemed at first the most static types have been undergoing the reverse process.  Betsy imagined herself the perfect wife of her perfect husband; Pete was defined by the name of his father, and Joan was the sophisticated mistress.  Each was guided in their own way by a certain idea of perfection, and each has undergone the shock of having those ideal egos turn alien on them.  Betsy gets wise to Don, Pete's father dies, and Joan is raped.  What they all were, they can no longer pretend to be.

So Don is different from the others insofar as the development of his character has consisted of his putting down roots whereas Betsy, Pete, Joan and others have each in their own way become uprooted.  But because rootlessness is, for Don, also a sort of ideal, the discrepancy between art and history, or between the ideal and the real, is what gives a common shape to the modernity that resides in each of their hearts.

The Zombie as Elegy: a review of "Dead Set"

Zombies have been eating at my brain recently.  It all started about a year ago, when I was motivated by my abiding interest in robots to purchase and read Chris Ryall's graphic novel, Zombies vs Robots (fantastic artwork by Ashley Wood...otherwise I don't recommend it).  I began thinking about how robots and zombies operate similarly but differently as Not-Humans.  Both robots and zombies are a means of manufacturing the characteristics we like to identify as uniquely human.  We like to imagine ourselves free-willed, open-minded and compassionate so we project the opposites of those qualities--mindless instinct, prejudice, and cruelty or absence of emotion (qualities of which even humans, especially humans, are capable)--into imagined non-human others.  This sort of formulation won't be new to anyone familiar with the emerging discourses of posthumanism, particular the Derrida-inspired work of Neil Badmington.

Anyway, while I've never considered myself much a fan of the horror genre, Zombies vs Robots took a little bite out of me and now it's infected.  I'm most of the way through a privately-screened Romero retrospective, and additionally I've been consuming loads of other zombie-related media from the past several years.

A few days ago I watched, late into the night, Charlie Brooker's Dead Set, a roughly three-hour mini-series that aired on E4 in the UK in October 2008.  Like most zombie flicks, the plot is dead simple: the production crew of the reality tv series Big Brother is preparing for a live eviction night.  Rambunctious crowds gather outside the BB house/studio in ravenous anticipation of the vote's result.  News reports of ongoing political protests threaten to bump the show from its usual timeslot, but unbeknownst to all the real trouble starts when a driver who is chauffering one house-mate's mother to the studio pulls off the rode to inspect what looks like a car crash and gets zombie-attacked.  To make the story short, the infection makes its way to the studio and converts the crowd.  Nowhere is safe...except inside the Big Brother house, which is fortunately so cut off from the carnage that when Kelly, a lowly member of the production team, enters the house covered in blood and brandishing large shears, the housemates mistake her at first for Big Brother's latest prank before a bitey encounter with one of the zombies gets their minds all right.

The act of taking refuge from zombies in the Big Brother house pretty much exhausts the novelty of the series.  What follows proceeds predictably.  A run for medical supplies.  A reunion between Kelly and her boyfriend, Riq, who's had his own tragic adventure getting to the studio with the help of a lonely, survival-oriented woman.  Ultimately, those taking refuge in the house turn on each other, acting out a parody of the way the real casts of Big Brother act out a parody of real life, and one by one they fall, ostensibly to the zombies, but really to stupidity, selfishness, jealousy, and cowardice.

Romero's influence is present throughout Dead Set, and this is most explicitly announced when Joplin, the cowardly lionizer, explains to Marky why the zombies have begun to amass outside the studio gates: "some primitive instinct....  This was like a temple for them."  Joplin is echoing a line originally spoken by Stephen in Dawn of the Dead (1978) when Francine asks him why the zombies are drawn to the mall:

Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Romero doesn't skimp on the thrills and gore, but satire and tragedy are the twin spirits that (re?)animate his films, and I think it's fair to say that, most broadly speaking, what he satirizes is human behaviors conditioned to be automatic...knee-jerk actions committed without first thinking through consequences.  Conversely, Romero regards as a virtue (though not, significantly, as a remedy to habit) the cognitive effort of careful planning.  In other words, the classical analogue to Romero's zombie hordes would be Euripides' Bacchantes.  So drunk they're dead-drunk.

As in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the recipient of Brooker's satirical barbs in Dead Set is the middle-class.  In Dawn of the Dead Romero focuses on their consumer habits, the more meta-fictional Dead Set is organized around the bourgeois cult of television (confession: I never miss Big Brother in the US, but in my half-hearted defense, the differences between the two shows make the US version much more of  a strategy game and much less of a schadenfruede party...I could say much more but maybe I'll save that for a post in the summer when the show returns).

But there is one detail of Dead Set that, according to one zombie purist, violates the spirit of Romero's undead: Brooker's zombies don't shuffle along, they run.  In a tongue-in-cheek review in The Guardian, Simon Pegg, who wrote and starred in the highly-recommended horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004), criticizes the phenomenon of running zombies, a bastard-innovation that he traces to 2002's 28 Days Later, a film that in his view is not, properly-speaking, a zombie movie because its monsters are merely diseased and not re-animated corpses.  Speed, according to Pegg, violates the essence of the zombie:

As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.  

Although in Brooker's defense I'll note the inability of Brooker's zombies to turn doorknobs or climb low fences, Pegg's criticism is insightful and informed, and (if I may return to my initial comparison of zombies with robots) I think he identifies in this passage one of the most significant differences between these two types of non-human others.  Both robots and zombies occupy a sort of middle category between life and dead or between being and non-being, but whereas robots negatively embody for us the humanity we like to imagine we've been given, zombies negatively embody the humanity we can lose.  One is busy being born; they other's busy dying.  

The Dystopian Future of the Past is Now!

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time. (Times Online, 9/29/09)

Some Dutch scientists backed by a sausage manufacturer have grown "a soggy form of pork" in a petri dish.  Where to begin?

Leaving aside a mostly silly dislike I have for the Netherlands (Rembrandt and Van Gogh...Awesome; pirate capital of consumption and Infernal setting of Camus' The Fall...not awesome), I think this begins with Chicken Little.

In 1952, Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote The Space Merchants, a novel I've been meaning to re-read.  It's sort of a satire of consumer-advertising culture, prescient in lots of ways, that follows Mitchell Courtenay, a future-day Don Draper, as he descends from the halls of Madison Avenue power to the dystopian subterranea of "Luna City" or something like that.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about the novel is when Mitch is escorted deep beneath a food-processing plant by a worker who is secretly also a member of the conservationist, dissident underground:

I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling.  "Concrete and lead.  It shields cosmic rays.  Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer."  He spat.  "No good to eat for people.  You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast and--" He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meant by "catch."

He swung open a door.  "This is her nest," he said proudly.  I looked and gulped.

The "Gallina" (AKA Chicken Little) is a 100-ton mound of growing flesh, fed from nutrient tubes and pruned by Mexicans with light sabers for general consumption by the people of the moon.

Now Space Merchants is undoubtedly a more sophisticated satire than I recall, but I remember being repulsed by the very idea of Chicken Little when I was younger.  Some kind of blob of meat, fed with tubes and and prone to cancer?  So unnatural and alien, thought I.  But, to quote Augustine, such a fool I then was.

According to a PETA rep quoted in the article, "if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal, there's no ethical objection."  So for someone who likes the taste of meat but draws some sort of line between animative and vegatative souls, this laboratory pork potentially solves a lot of problems.

But in fact, I'm not entirely sure what line or lines I draw.  I eat most of the usual meats, generally without compunction.  (Although I have been staying away from shrimp for the last several months, purportedly in support of mangrove swamps, but also because my brother once referred to them as the cockroaches of the sea, which maybe means that my ethics are always really aesthetic judgments in disguise).  Occasionally I try to determine a line.  Would I eat a dolphin?  Blue whale?  Elephant? Monkey? Mountain gorilla?  What if s/he knows sign language?  What about a friend of mine who died in an accident?  If something wanted to eat me after I died, I don't think I would mind.  Either that or worms anyway.  Is there a cognitive/non-cognitive line I would draw if I could decide what cognition was?  

It's probably true that the more like a human being an organism is, the more distasteful would be the idea of me eating it, which isn't to say that there's anything natural about this distaste, but I wonder if whatever explains that distaste might also explain the uncanny valley?  On the other hand, I also don't want to eat a bowl of spiders.

Quote for the Week

The second part of the Dexter/Raskolnikov comparison is going to wait a bit, but here's something to keep us occupied and sort of on target:

The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species.  Predators get hungry, but pouncing on their prey is difficult and often dangerous; additional impulses may be needed for the beast to dare it.  These impulses and the unpleasantness of hunger fuse into rage at the victim, a rage whose expression in turn serves the end of frightening and paralyzing the victim.  In the advance to humanity this is rationalized by projection.  The “rational animal” with an appetite for his opponent is already fortunate enough to have a superego and must find a reason.  The more completely his actions follow the law of self-preservation, the less can he admit the primacy of that law to himself and to others; if he did, his laboriously attained status of a zoon politikon would lose all credibility.

The animal to be devoured must be evil.  The sublimation of this anthropological schema extends all the way to epistemology.  Idealism—most explicitly Fichte—gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I, l’autrui, and finally all that reminds us of nature is inferior, so the unity of the self-preserving thought may devour it without misgivings.  This justifies the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite.  The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.  It disfigures even Kant’s humanism and refutes the aura of higher and nobler things in which he knew how to garb it.  The view of man in the middle is akin to misanthropy: leave nothing unchallenged.  The august inexorability of the moral law was this kind of rationalized rage at nonidentity; nor did the liberalistic Hegel do better with the superiority of his bad conscience, dressing down those who refused homage to the speculative concept, the hypostasis of the mind.  Nietzsche’s liberating act, a true turning point of Western thought and merely usurped by others later, was to put such mysteries into words.  A mind that discards rationalization—its own spell—ceases by its self-reflection to be the radical evil that irks it in another.

Adorno, “Idealism as Rage,” Negative Dialectics, p. 22-3, my emphasis

Raskolnikov and Dexter, part 1

We're currently working our way through Crime and Punishment in one of the classes I'm teaching, and we spent almost the whole of the last class working through Raskolnikov's theory of the "extraordinary man."  In the fifth chapter of Part 3, smack dab in the middle of the book, Porfiry (the man investigating the pawnbroker’s murder) cunningly gets Raskolnikov talking about an article he had written as a student, in which he distinguishes between the common, obedient mass of humanity and "those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment."¹ 

The man with such a gift, argues Raskolnikov, is almost always judged a criminal by his contemporaries, though he “has a right...that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to...step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea--sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind--calls for it." ²

Sort of by surprise, I presented them with an overly-reductive summary of Alain Badiou’s little book on ethics.  For Badiou, we are not born “subjects.”  We are simply Homo sapiens, a species of animal, and animal behavior is amoral—it obeys certain “natural” laws but it would be inaccurate to describe any of their actions as good or evil; however, when an animal (not necessarily a human being) experiences  what Badiou terms a “truth-event,” it then becomes the subject of a truth, something more than animal. 

Now truths (and these are subjective “truths” we’re talking about) come in four different flavors for Badiou, which strikes me as a little arbitrary or Aristotelian or something, but those flavors are Art, Love, Politics, and Science.  Not every animal is going to become the subject of a truth, but you might have one that realizes that it is in love with someone else, or another that realizes that the earth revolves around the sun, or another yet to whom it occurs that the history of the world is the history of class struggle.

A truth-event speaks a new word and hands down a new law, and the subject of a truth, like Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man, must remain faithful to his or her truth—must fulfill his or her idea—or pretend it never happened…and this alone—infidelity to truth—is evil, for Badiou.  

So anyway, throughout this class, my brain kept echoing the phrase “an idea transcended into life” over and over again.  An idea transcended into life…where have I heard that?  I resisted the urge to say it out loud.  An idea transcended into life. Was it Nietzsche?  No, don’t be an idiot.  An idea transcended into life.  It’s related to what I’m talking about but why does my brain keep repeating it like that?

I soldiered on.  I answered their questions and corrected their misunderstandings.  One student seemed to find the claim that human beings are animals very insulting.  Another student jumped in and made my counter-argument for me.  And if I’m any judge, the class session turned out to be extremely productive as far as situating the novel in the proper philosophical context was concerned.  But it wasn’t until long after the class, on the bus ride home, that I remembered where I’d heard that line.

It was from Dexter.

Stay tuned for when I compare Dexter to Raskolnikov and explain why even though I’ve never really liked the ending of Crime and Punishment, I understand why it had to end the way it did, and why I think Dexter, despite how much I continue to enjoy watching it, may have jumped the shark.

¹ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Vintage Classics. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.  p. 260.

² Ibid. p. 259

Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled*

I was disappointed to read the following in Jonathan Turley's Oct. 19 op-ed in USA Today, via Radley Balko:

Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law. It came from the most unlikely of places: the United States.

But I was relieved to read the following today at the Washington Post, via Little Green Footballs, via Jeffrey Goldberg:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized on Monday an attempt by Islamic countries to prohibit defamation of religions, saying such policies would restrict free speech.

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies. . . . I strongly disagree," Clinton said. "The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions."

Nothing too complicated at work here. Just two fairly non-committal comments by Obama administration officials about a non-binding UN resolution transformed by the medium of the press into the following seeming contradiction: when faced with the mutually exclusive choice between blasphemy and censorship, the Obama administration sides with both against both.

This reminds me of a wide-ranging essay I read (skimmed) about two years ago by Slavoj Zizek, "Tolerance as Ideological Category," in which he attempts to wrestle with the "impasse of tolerating intolerance":

Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance...

(I.e. if there's one thing I can't stand, it's intolerance!) It's a fascinating essay, but I'm going to give it short-shrift and boil the conclusion to this: "the particular ethnic substance, our 'life-world,' which resists universality, is made of habits," (emphasis mine) and:

[t]his obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to change, which is why the motto of every radical emancipatory politics is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as the exergue for his Interpretations of Dreams: Acheronta movebo - dare to move the underground!

Zizek, in this essay at least, seems still to consider humanity a universal function...as a featureless remnant derived from the subtraction of particular differences (humanity is the nothing left when one subtracts from the American man the habits of his American-ness and male-ness), but it strikes me, and perhaps Zizek would agree, that humanity is also a habit and that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would not seem so inalienable had I not learned them by rote. And perhaps, instead of horror and guilt at the news of Lakhdar Boumediene's treatment at Guantanamo Bay I should feel something else. Because it turns out that wisdom, if not information, is the fruit of torture.

"I'm an animal? I'm not human?"

You're welcome.

*from Agamemnon, by Aeschylus