Kindle image

Here’s the Kindle title page for Prince of Networks, a book that I still do not own in any medium (image courtesy of Michael Flower).

I’m still a believer in the ultimate dominance of these devices. It may not be the Kindle in particular, and it may look different from anything we expect. But even the Kindle already has too strong a foothold to vanish as a passing fad. And more importantly, there are good reasons why it exists.

I realize there’s a lot of attachment in our profession to printed books on paper. And I can even understand that attachment. But I don’t share it. If I could immediately have someone take away my 1,600 books and give me an electronic equivalent thereof, I would consider it a great liberation to have them all instantly accessible on a single lightweight device (with the exception of a tiny handful of paper books that have great sentimental value). There are still a few problems with the new platform (hard to take notes, etc.), but I’m always surprised that those problems are not viewed as utterly temporary.

Does anyone really think that paper books are going to be the primary medium of intellectual life 50 years from now, let alone 100 years? If I had to dump all of my MP3 files and go back to vinyl and cassettes, it would be horrible. I don’t even go back to the c.d.’s much anymore, except to copy my favorite songs into MP3 format. I expect to be saying the same thing about paper books in the waning days of my career.

Finally, I expect the new medium to force people to write better, which can only be a good thing. The current book genre allows one to get away with miserably boring prose that I expect will be less appealing on handheld reading devices, just as it already reduces readership in the blogosphere. In the blogging medium you have to keep things punchy and get to the point pretty quickly, and most importantly you have to make some sort of immediate contact with the reader’s interest. With books, you can sometimes look more serious the more boring you are. That has to stop.

final post of the night

To sum up… We have gotten stuck in the rut of critique, and whatever the wider cultural roots of this disease, there are clear philosophical sources for it as well.

So often, there is the assumption that the more we sneer, the more we take a distance from every positive claim, sticking every one of our sentences inside of parentheses or quotation marks, the more we debunk and abstain and withhold, then the more intelligent we are.

This equation has so much staying power because, I suppose, it is half-true. A good half of enlightenment was about stripping bare the temples of superstition and alchemy and showing that many of the contents of former beliefs could be reduced to “nothing more than” X, Y, and Z (generally a physical substratum of some sort). The intellectual became a denier and a liquidator, fumigating the mere beliefs of the gullible. The intellectual could say any number of things, but the method always had to be that of critique. This might involve an intellectual movement of negation, or it might involve an ethical movement of “transgression,” deflowering the pieties of others in public.

This having become such an overwhelmingly global picture of what the work of the intellectual consists in, it followed that any distaste with this strategy would look like “reaction,” like a return to what had already been successfully debunked by liberated critical thinkers.

Of course, that was never the only alternative. The real alternative is “to make things more real, not less real” (Latour), to find previously unknown realities with which we were entangled all along, without knowing it. In some ways it is surprising that science has been associated with critique, because science has been the greatest creator of new sincerities that the world has ever known… We don’t believe in less than primeval hordes of hunter-gatherers did, but obviously believe in much more. I believe in distant galaxies, the Big Bang, and what science tells me about the composition of the earth’s core. We believe in Einsteinian curvature of space-time, even though everyday life does little to ratify this belief. We spend many hours reading histories and biographies about long-dead people, and are fascinated by the lives of viruses and the grammars of dying languages.

So many realities shape our environment that I believe that the cynical attempt to withhold oneself from all reality is even the clearest sign of a cookie-cutter pseudo-intellectual. Trolls and grey vampires are merely two of the most unpleasant symptoms of such an attitude, which by now has become fairly rampant.

What we need is more innocence and enthusiasm in intellectual life, not more sneering critique and labyrinthine qualification and complexification.

what we forgot about

It’s not like I was a huge Michael Jackson fan (except in 5th grade, around 1979) so I don’t want to make endless posts on the subject any more than I want to bore people with endless passages from Gibbon (though there will still be plenty of those to come).

However, following on Shaviro’s point… if you want to reduce Michael Jackson to some sort of locus of commodities and commodification, you’re going to have to convince me why THIS is not an incredible performance worthy of nothing but human admiration and joy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MichaelJacksonMoonwalk.ogg

I wish we could have kept this Michael Jackson for a lot longer.

If you’re in the mood for the full version, it’s here. I haven’t seen this in well over 20 years, and am in awe watching it again now. The highlight, which the Wikipedia clip contains, comes starting at around 3:30 of the longer video:

Shaviro’s post

SHAVIRO HAS HIS OWN MICHAEL JACKSON POST UP.

I agree very much with Shaviro’s points about race, and I must say it’s been shocking (I honestly didn’t realize this) to read in the Jackson obits that early MTV featured an all-white lineup before Jackson took over. For various reasons I was an early hater of the music video as a genre, and so I was never watching MTV in the early years or any later year, and didn’t really know who they were showing. To this day, I may have seen fewer music videos than anyone my age who has not been imprisoned or in a religious cult on some island somewhere. I just don’t like them, though I won’t try to spell out my reasons here as to why.

My favorite part of Shaviro’s post was this:

“So I think that everything Greil Marcus criticizes the Michael Jackson juggernaut for could be said with equal justice of Elvis and the Beatles as well (and also of the Sex Pistols, although their niche-marketing and publicity-through-scandal strategies were ahead of their time, and put them in a slightly different category). Of course, none of this would matter, really — it would just be another banal self-evidence of our everyday lives, alongside Ikea and Facebook and the iPhone — if it weren’t for the beauty and the genius of all of these artists’ performances, of their music and their self-presentation to their audiences, and their overall personas. That is to say, of their aesthetic singularities, or of what Bloch or Jameson would call their ‘utopian’ dimension. The modulations of Michael’s voice, the sinuous movements of his dancing, the way that his musical arrangements took disco and r&b and gave them both a smoothness and a slightly alien sheen, so subtly that one could say with equal justice that the sharp edges of mournful or joyous black expression had been ‘mainstreamed,’ or that the very ‘mainstream’ itself had been alluringly or insidiously carried away, exposed to a strange metamorphosis, allowed to blossom into a new aestheticized state in which pop crassness had itself become a rare, almost Wildean, delicacy.”

If there is anything I most dislike in intellectual life, it is the tendency to turn every non-political, non-economic experience into some ultra-critical, ultra-reflexive discourse on commodities and oppression. And more and more, I worry that many of the philosophical defenses of correlationism are designed purely to defend this sort of culturo-political besserwisserei that for some people is the very essence of intellectual life. When people say that Speculative Realism claims politics is nothing, what they really are complaining about it is that it says that politics is not everything. Which, in fact, it is not.

another thing I’d like to write someday but possibly never will

The whole day is devoted to that tedious but necessary exercise of figuring out what to do with all the e-mail that piled up during 10 days away. I responded to most of it on the fly while traveling, but a number of the messages demand actual work, and they all need to be gone through again to make sure I missed nothing important, which is easy to do while blowing through them the first time. (And if you’re like me, there’s a strange tendency to mentally add or remove the word “not” from certain key sentences, with the result of thinking someone said exactly the opposite of what they really said. That’s why I usually read all e-mails at least twice, separated by a decent interval.)

At any rate, here’s something that would be worth writing… A sort of historical portrait of the pre-Socratic environment. Books obviously already exist on the Archaic Period, and plenty of scholarship exists on the pre-Socratics. But for the most part these are just words to most of us. We don’t have a good intuitive feel for what that period was like.

As a trivial-seeming contrast, take the mafia, or cowboys. Some of what we know about them is undoubtedly silly stereotype. But I’ll bet if you spent some time around mobsters, you’d probably find yourself thinking “man, these people are like something out of a mafia film!” We have a certain feel for the habits, table manners, and style of speech of these people, not to mention their ways of intimidating others or taking revenge. The same holds for cowboys. We have some intuitive idea of how they get from place to place and what they might do on a typical or atypical day.

Granted, these people are much closer in time to us than the pre-Socratics, but I know of no really thorough attempt to bring to life the landscape on which philosophy was born. I’m not even entirely sure how one would do it, or even whether a book is the appropriate medium. But it’s an important era for our profession, and one on which we have a fairly poor handle, for the most part.

the power of finite numbers

Couldn’t think of a better post title than that, but it’s probably not precise enough. Here’s what I mean.

At some point while flying yesterday, I was thinking about what a familiar experience it is. I’ve flown so many times… But then I wondered how many times I’ve actually flown on a commercial aircraft. Probably not more than 500, if I estimate it. That may sound like a fair number of flights, but take them away and I am left with zero, no experience at all.

The same thing when I was landing at Cairo Airport last night, which now seems like such a familiar homecoming experience. But how many times have I actually landed at Cairo Airport? When you get right down to it, probably less than 50.

I suppose what got me thinking about this topic was my apartment in the center of Belgrade. I would only enter and leave it a few times per day, and other than sleep I was only spending 2-3 hours there per day. But over the course of five days, that was enough to make it feel like home, to the point that I really miss it and am mentally still living there, walking through the place and down the adjoining streets outside.

Or a typical semester… You feel like you know your students pretty well by the end of a semester, but it’s still, what, just 40 contact hours?

My point is that we actually tend to learn things and make decisions rather quickly. You might easily fall in love with someone after less than 5 contact hours. You might reach unshakeable decisions about the nature of a friend or colleague after just 4 or 5 meetings, and be right more often than not. You might grasp the essential feel of an author after 40 pages.

Whenever they speak of how many hours of flying experience a certain pilot has, I always find myself feeling that the number sounds alarmingly low. Somehow, you want the number to be “infinity” flying hours for the pilot. But that’s a needless dissatisfaction, I guess, because we really are able to pick up skills after a finite number of repetitions that is lower than believed.

Unless you’ve been married for a good many years, your greatest amount of interaction has probably been with your mother. (It’s hard to surpass those tends of thousands of hours in the early years.) If you’re like most people, you probably feel like you know your mother fairly well, and to a certain extent you do. But there have still been a finite number of contact hours between you.

There’s a more general point here that is eluding precise definition for me at the moment, but it has something to do with the surprising speed with which things take shape. Do something 3 or 4 times, and suddenly it’s a habit. My only “long” stay in Istanbul was for five days in 2002, and since then nothing but airport layovers, and yet I have a rough map of the city burned into my head and certain routines I always follow just as if it were my hometown.

prizes for underrated continental philosophy

Incidentally, everyone has been in such a rush to proclaim the desirability of ending the analytic/continental divide in philosophy. But I find myself wanting to intensify the divide, namely by means of an improved continental philosophy. So, I’m no longer feeling as interested as I was, say, 5 years ago, in having everyone dump the term “continental.” The key analytic philosophers should not be ignored as much as they have been on our side of the fence, and I also enjoy the self-confidence and precision of the better analytic work. However, there are still things about the analytic culture that I not only find difficult to stomach, but which I find to be intellectually erroneous (such as the aforementioned article of faith that the argument is all that counts, and everything else is mere cosmetic ornament).

However, all of that is merely prologue to some awards to be passed out by this blog.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the Past 20 Years

BRUNO LATOUR

He hasn’t been underrated in other humanities fields, where he is a major star and very much gets treated like one if you have the chance to see him in action on his home turf, as I have. Analytic philosophers also seem to know who he is (though it usually comes out as the American anti-Latour bias of calling him a “social constructionist,” the opposite of the French bias against him that treats him as a crusty reactionary realist).

I call Latour underrated not just because his work is too good to merit his being ignored by “continental philosophy” circles, but because he has much to say on a number of topics that those circles already debate, but with inferior richness and precision.

In future decades, I expect Latour to look like one of the major philosophers of the 1990’s and neighboring decades, and it will take a very subtle historian to prove the unthinkable fact that Latour actually wasn’t recognized as such until after the fact. In America we weren’t touching Latour in continental philosophy departments; we were cutting through second-growth deconstructive scrubland and kinda sorta getting on the Deleuze bandwagon.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the 1945-1980 Period

XAVIER ZUBIRI

Zubiri really is that good. Ignore the initial impression of dismal neo-Scholasticism. That’s not what it is. He can change the way your brain works. Or at least he did it for me.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the Early 20th Century

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

This may sound questionable, since Whitehead isn’t really a “continental philosopher” at all. The reason I give him this prize is that the failure of the leading German thinkers of the phenomenology era to take Whitehead seriously, and the ensuing French failure to take him seriously enough (Merleau-Ponty’s engagement wasn’t big or deep enough, and Deleuze’s not technical enough) set continental philosophy back 40 or 50 years from where it would now be. We wouldn’t even need Meillassoux’s polemic against correlationism if Whitehead were already a bigger ingredient in today’s mix.

Rasta Tetris

In preparation for Ian Bogost`s upcoming visit to Cairo (more again about his work very soon), I`ve been reading his book on the Atari, co-authored with Nick Montfort. I`m going to do a post or series of posts on my own, non-expert reaction to early videogames. But for now, while killing time waiting for the bus from the new campus back home, I`m reminded of a slightly flippant but strangely durable videogame wish I always had.

You`ll all remember the game Tetris, and how it was closely associated with a Russian theme. This was even more true on the very nice Mac version, which had grainy black-and-white Russian illustrations to go along with the Russian music (which was far more haunting on the Mac version than in the Disney-like Russian music of the arcade version).

That always gave me a wish, for some reason, to own an alternate Jamaican-themed version of Tetris. No, this has nothing to do with “smoking” (hee heh hah, how transgressive). It has to do with a wish to unlock the subtly different emotional resonances that might be unleashed in the game by shifting the implied scene of action elsewhere. (For similar reasons, I have long been hoping that someone would stage a complete Wagnerian Ring Cycle in the Caribbean.)

I had the whole game planned out, including the illustrations and the music. Level One would be a slow instrumental version of “Roots, Rock, Reggae.”

The first “fast” level, maybe Level five, would get “I Shot the Sheriff.” Followed by “Could You Be Loved” near the end, again even a bit faster in tempo than normal, and it`s already a pretty fast song.

It wouldn`t only be Marley. I had Burning Spear`s “Marcus Garvey” in the mix somewhere as well.

If you are a game programmer with a lot of time on your hands, please make this happen! If you do, I will try to write you in as a character in Circus Philosophicus II, assuming there`s enough demand for a sequel (and I think there will be; who doesn`t like Platonic dialogues staged at offshore oil platforms?).

For some reason this reminds me of the far weirder idea dreamed up at around the same time by my lovably sleazy boon companion of college years, Alex from Hong Kong. Alex dreamed of opening a strip joint featuring atonal music. Though it`s probably a bad idea on any level you can think of (moral, legal, aesthetic), my favorite part is trying to imagine the sort of clientele that could conceivably keep such a place in business. Now there`s your intellectual avant garde for the coming 22nd century dystopia! And Hong Kong might not be a bad place to start it.

K-Punk on “Billie Jean”

In K-Punk`s longer Michael Jackson post, you can see one photo of Michael Jackson the way I prefer to remember him as well: the first standalone photo, with the microphone near his mouth and the green laser light flashing past. I loved the guy back then too. He has tremendous human appeal in photos from that era, and I guess I am fairly conventional in feeling sickened by what he became from about 1984 onward.

I`m not quite as big a fan of Off the Wall as K-Punk seems to be; Jackson had already lost me when he switched from funk/soul to disco (and I was by no means a disco hater at the time, I just thought it wasn`t his best genre). What I really liked was the late Motown stuff when the Jacksons were really stilll just kids. My ultra-soulful younger cousins Dawn and Taera were early fans and got me hooked on songs like “ABC.”

But… I do agree completely with K-Punk that Thriller really isn’t a very good album (I never bought it and never would) EXCEPT for “Billie Jean,” which is more of a marvel the more and more I listen to it since returning to my MP3 stash in Egypt. “Multi-levelled sound sculpture” indeed! If you haven`t heard it for awhile, it is well worth the 99-cent download from iTunes. There is so much going on in that song in musical terms. It is a rich sonic environment, with Jackson`s strange vocal quirks not least among the treasures it contains.

I hadn`t dared think of the song as “one of the greatest art works of the twentieth century,” but as the carnival freak Late Jackson gradually fades from view and perhaps a bit of 1980`s nostalgia eventually wells up (I can`t bring myself to feel any so far, even though I`ve been through my 1990`s nostalgia phase already) then I think you can put “Billie Jean” on a very short list of the greatest pop tunes ever recorded. It would have sounded like a crazy claim to me even two years ago, but you just have to go back and listen to it carefully to see what I mean. It`s a masterpiece long damaged by overexposure.

“But before the Thriller phenomenon encased Jackson in the hypercommodity that he was now reduced to being just a little part of – he would soon be only a biotic component going mad in the middle of a vast multimedia megamachine that bore his name – but before all that was `Billie Jean.` `Billie Jean` is not only one of the best singles ever recorded, it is one of the greatest art works of the twentieth century, a multi-levelled sound sculpture whose slinky, synthetic-panther sheen still yields up previously unnoticed details and nuance nearly thirty years on. The only remote parallel I can think of in 80s pop is the sonic architecture that Arif Mardin designed for Chaka Chan on `I Feel For You.`

Sometimes, the weariness brought on by hearing it so many times will make you twitch the dial when `Billie Jean` comes on the radio. But let it play, and you’re soon bewitched by its drama, seduced into its sonic fictional space, the mean streets and chilly single-parent single-room appartments that now suround the still-glittering dancefloor like conspiring fate. Listening is like stepping onto a conveyor belt. And that’s what it sounds like, as the implacable, undulating sinous cakewalk of the synthetic bass takes over the massive space opened up by the crunching snares Jones and Jackson insouciantly hijacked from hiphop. Check, if you can manage to keep focused as the track crawls up your spine and down to your feet, embodying the very compulsion the lyric warns against… check the way that the first sounds you hear from Jackson are not words but inhuman asignifying hiccups and yelps, as if he is gasping for air, or learning to speak English again after some aphasic episode.

Ten years after psychedelic Soul, this is cyborg Soul, with Jackson as cut-up as Grace Jones ever was – partly by the (James) Brownian motion of his own language-disassembling vocal tics (the mirthless, and indeed emotionally unitelligible, joker-hysterical hee-hees, the ooohs shotgun-divorced from doo-wop’s street corner community to circulate like disembodied wraithes in the survivalist badlands of an inner city ravaged by Reaganomics), partly by the astonishing arrangement. Check the way that the first string-stabs shadow the track like stalker’s footsteps, disappearing into the cold wind like mist and rumour. Feel the tension building in your teeth as the bridge hurtles towards the chorus, begging for a release (`the smell of sweet perfume/ this happened much too soon`) that you know will only end in regret, recrimination and humiliation, but which you can’t help but want any way, desire so intense it threatens to fragment the psyche, or expose the way that the psyche is always-already split into antagonistic agencies: `just remember to always think twice.` Does he then sing `do think twice` or, in an id-exclamation that echoes like a metallic shout in an alley of the mind, `don’t think twice?` Everything dissolves into audio-hallucination, the chronology gets confused, the noir string-slivers shiver. Jackson is angry at his accuser (and also at the fans who will trap him into the Image: Billie Jean is pop’s Misery) but also weirdly mournful, hunted, pleading (to the big Other, in kettle logic: I didn’t do it, I couldn’t help it), the part-objects of his voice circling a psyche without a centre.”

“The King of Pop”

With all the travel I still haven’t had a chance to read K-Punk’s post on Michael Jackson, though its reputation precedes it.

I have the MP3 of “Billie Jean” going on repeat as a sort of tribute to the poor guy while unpacking. I do think that’s the best song of his superduperduperstar phase (I like some of the stuff from the 1970’s even better). Somehow I lost interest in him just as he became the Most Popular Star Ever, though since I was just hitting high school about then it’s likely my tastes would have changed anyway. And besides, since I’ve always tended to hate massly popular cultural stuff (not because it’s popular, but because it almost always has to lose its edginess in order to become so popular) my abandonment of his career at age 14 isn’t too much of a surprise.

What strikes me most about “Billie Jean” right now is how brilliantly produced the song is. Yeah, it’s studio pop music, heavily orchestrated, with the “media elite” of Los Angeles completely brushing it up, down, and sideways. But there are still a lot of clever musical ideas in there, a few surprises, and it’s just dark enough both musically and thematically to give it an edge compared to most megapop music. (It’s also a fairly original theme, isn’t it? Did any other pop song deal with that issue? A paternity accusation? It could easily have been a ridiculous tune with that theme, but MJ and Co. pull it off with a pop masterpiece. It reminds me of what a musicologist once said about the Beatles’ “She Loves You”… it’s a bizarre tune precisely because that never actually happens in real life– young males being supportive of each other’s romantic relationships to that extent. Never thought of that point until reading it, but it’s true, and it does make the song a bit weird, thematically.) Also, let’s admit it… Michael Jackson had a certain something to him. He does interesting things with his voice that no one else ever did.

My funniest memory of this tune is of riding in a car from Pennsylvania to Iowa at around 3 AM with, of all people, my father (asleep in the back seat) and my other grandfather (my mother’s father, who was trying to drive despite being on the verge of sleep). He was 71 years old then, and still the ultimate macho WWII-era American guy even at that age. He was always the best person to have help with moving, because he owned and used every possible tool, and knew how to tie more knots than a Scoutmaster.

None of us were in any condition to drive (I mean sleeplessness, not liquor), but we absolutely had to get back to Iowa without stopping. My grandfather was always the toughest guy of the three of us, or in any larger group up to 100 people, so he took the driving job by default.

But he was about to pass out with fatigue, and turned on the radio and was running the dial trying to find anything that could keep him awake. He ran across “Billie Jean,” and started tapping his foot on the floor. I teased him, asking if he liked Michael Jackson. His response: “Oh, is that who this is? Well, not really. But at least it has a beat.”

The song kept him awake. But eventually he fell asleep at the wheel for a couple of seconds and we heard the gravel on the edge of the road. Really, none of us should have been driving; we should have gotten a hotel room. But we made it back to Iowa at dawn. It’s a nice memory, and the King of Pop has a small foothold in it.

[ADDENDUM: There’s another factor adding to the thematic weirdness of “Billie Jean,” which is the fact that Michael Jackson is the one singing it. I mean no aspersions here; the rumors about him are so universal that they almost don’t really count as nasty rumors.

But even if, at least for the sake of argument, you accept the thesis that Michael was a sort of typical straight male, I can still think of no one less likely to pick up a woman at a club, accidentally get her pregnant, and then deny it. Really… this would happen to pretty much any male I know before it happened to Jackson. For some reason I just can’t imagine it ever occurring in his case, which adds yet another touch of freakishness to a song whose surprising weirdness has been deadened for us by its billion radio replays since 1982.]