U.S. libraries and nudity

Everyone who sent me tips about the McLuhan/Playboy issue worried that I probably already had 50 responses. In fact, I only had three (one of which included a PDF of the whole issue of the magazine).

One reader wrote in as follows:

“…but I can assure you that many universities subscribe to Playboy, and many provide document delivery, which means they will send you the article or a pdf of it, no problem, no lecture, no questions asked. Libraries collect all kinds of material sans judgement. I read George Lincoln Rockwell’s autobiography at UCLA special collections and no one blinked.”

True, and any self-respecting American library also carries Mein Kampf (we love our First Amendment; the world’s largest Nazi publisher is in Nebraska, I believe).

And I suppose it makes sense that university libraries would give you whatever you want, no questions asked. Aside from the principle of it, there’s probably plenty of legitimate academic pop culture research going on concerning Penthouse and related topics.

Nonetheless, sex has always played by different rules in America, with its Puritan history. And part of me would have expected American libraries to take a stand against Playboy for both “moral” and “political” reasons. My high school used to censor the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, for instance (it was high school, but still).

It is well known and widely remarked that any amount of violence is OK in American media, but almost no amount of sex. I think it was George Lucas who said: “On American TV, you can cut off a breast, but you can’t kiss it.”

the exact McLuhan quote

Hat tip, James S.:

“The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”

Right, that’s it.

funniest article pagination ever

The good people who ran the McLuhan Centennial in Brussels last October are putting together a conference anthology. Today they sent me my copyedited manuscript which contained two queries.

The first concerned a sentence about Husserl rendered nonsensical by some missing words, which I inserted. But the second was that they wanted to know the pagination of a specific McLuhan text from which I had quoted.

The text in question was McLuhan’s 1969 interview in Playboy, famous in McLuhan studies in part due to the famous phrase that “the content of a medium is about as important as the graffiti on an atomic bomb,” or words to that effect, and that was precisely the quotation I was using.

The problem with citing this phrase is that I don’t know the exact pagination. I don’t own that issue (or any issue) of Playboy. To try to obtain a 43-year-old issue of the magazine on eBay would surely be both expensive and somewhat uncomfortable, and it could be even more uncomfortable to ask your librarian to get you a copy (especially if you live in Egypt, where I believe Playboy also happens to be illegal). All I have, and presumably all that most McLuhan readers have, is the PDF of an interview typescript that starts with Page 1 rather than with the actual magazine pagination.

But after a bit of hunting, here is what I found as the correct pagination of the McLuhan interview: pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63. (!!!)

You can just imagine what’s on pages 28-44, 46-54, 57-60, and 62.

What would be the proper protocol for getting this piece on interlibrary loan in the States, assuming that you just wanted the interview? I’d feel a bit ridiculous asking for such gerrymandered pages from a librarian, but also wouldn’t necessarily want to order pp. 26-63 just to make it simpler. That might earn you an unpleasant lecture about library policy.

Egypt’s new Prime Minister

He is HESHAM KANDIL, a low-profile devout Muslim and former Minister of Irrigation with no track record of belonging to any political Islamist group.

No one knows much about him, but we may as well give him a chance. I like his call for a “technocratic” Cabinet– Egypt has many urgent practical problems that need the help of technocrats over the next couple of years. We’ve had enough drama here in the past 18 months. It’s time to solve some problems. Let’s see if he can help.

flyer for the Curitiba talk

Latour Litany of the day

Clement Greenberg with a cranky but still funny dismissal of types of contemporary art (this was in May 1968):

“a row of boxes… a mere rod… a pile of litter… projects for Cyclopean landscape architecture… the plan for a trench dug in a straight line for hundreds of miles… a half-open door… the cross-section of a mountain… stating imaginary relations between real points in real places… a blank wall, and so forth.”

I think my favorite is “a mere rod.”

1989 U.S. cable on the Muslim Brotherhood, from Wikileaks

It’s written by then-top U.S. official Frank Wisner, HERE.

Berlin audio

This seems to be the complete audio from the various Berlin speculative realism lectures in April and May.

HERE.

a head-scratching argument that continually recurs

It runs something like this:

“Object-oriented philosophy claims to push humans out of the center of philosophy. Yet only humans can understand it. Therefore, object-oriented philosophy is a contradiction.”

By the same line of reasoning, you could say that astrophysics claims to talk about distant stars and nebulae, but since only humans do astrophysics, then astrophysics is really just about people.

I have a different view of science, and so should you.

Incidentally, I should also note that if someone says that the speculative realists believe in flat ontology, then that person is all mixed up. Of the original speculative realists, only one (the author of this post) has anything remotely resembling a flat ontology, and even I have explicitly rejected flatness as an obligatory principle (I have two kinds of objects, after all: the real and the sensual).

The flat ontologists in our part of the world include the early Latour, DeLanda, Bryant, and Garcia. In Bonn, Markus Gabriel gave us an early showing of what looks like a bona fide flat ontology as well.

Among the other original speculative realists, Meillassoux would surely have no interest in a flat ontology (when all is said and done, he wants the human to maintain a privileged ontological status) while Brassier is openly hostile to the notion, since the anti-reductionist credo of flat ontologies and Brassier’s eliminativism are simply an impossible mix. (I’m not sure about Grant.)

So, it is simply false to identify speculative realism with flat ontology, and if you identify them then you are not inspiring much confidence in your critical views. It would even be false (though a bit closer to the mark) to identify OOO with flat ontology, since that would efface the differences between all of us on this question.

review of Bryant, The Democracy of Objects

By Michael Barnes Norton, HERE.