jane dark's sugarhigh!

what do these soldiers know of capital?

Our Beltway correspondent directs our attention to this remarkable story in the L.A. Times, which he summarizes as follows:

[The article is] on a West Point ethics prof named Ted Westhusing who volunteered to serve in Iraq so as to be better able to understand the ethics of modern war; who was assigned to work with private contractors; gradually realized that they were truly evil; and killed himself. The article establishes him as this super-soldier / philosopher with a passion for honor, and then, in an about-face, quotes a military psychologist on his suicide.

Yeah, he just wasn't smart enough to understand capitalism.

circle game/jerk

I miss Tori Amos's greatness the way I miss lost friends. But I don't think it's coming back, and the one thing she hasn't lost is her interpretive brilliance. So the other night I found myself wishing she would just walk into the studio and record an entire Joni Mitchelll album; my preference would be For The Roses, because then I could hear her versions of "See You Sometime" and "Blond in the Bleachers" and I can't even stand how superb I am certain it would be when Tori slurred "she tapes her regrets to the microphone stand" and everybody and I stopped breathing. But whatever, she could record Blue or Court & Spark and it would be a beautiful day.

But I think I understand the problem. Given the similarities that already exist between the two, I can see how Tori would be in effect admitting that she was a lesser artist than Joni; it would have the air of tribute, and for all the covers (my favorites are "For Emily Wherever I May Find Her" and "Angie"), including the cover of Joni's "River," Tori isn't really a tributary.

What to do? My idea is this: it only works if everybody's paying tribute, if everybody gets to be the alpha and beta dogs at once. So Tori does a full album of Joni, Joni does Slayer, Slayer records the second Sleater-Kinney album, Sleater-Kinnney covers Whodini, Whodini interprets Kris Kristofferson...well, you get the picture. And in the end, Chaka Khan goes into the studio and lays down every blessed verse of a Tori release; exeunt omnes. I mean, she's every woman; she might as well be Boys for Pele. Now who's with me?

seasonal

Thanksgiving is here at sugarhigh! world headquarters, and as we listen to Cinderella's "Heartbreak Station" and metonymically miss Buckcherry more than ever (you know how there's all those movies about families split apart by the death of the kid, from which no one can ever recover? That's how I feel about the loss of Buckcherry), we remark that the season is upon us: the year-end voting season, that is, where publicists drop us notes reminding us to hold slightly-better-than-expected band X from back in April in mind as we confront the plethora of ballots heading our way like a snowstorm of democracy, and the boys over at ILX (they really are mostly boys, despite the periodic apparitions of j-ho and Kandia) lube themselves up for the annual OCD jerkfest that is the Top 10 list and, far more importantly, expressing how much you hate someone else's Top 10 list which proves that they are a nitwit or patzer.

Ooooh, I can hardly wait.

Actually, there will be good parts. The critical form of the year-end ballot comment is to Rob Sheffield as the rhythm track is to Tim Mosely, and all one can do is wonder, how can someone be so good at this, in so many different ways, for so long? And there's something amusing about watching the tortured monologues around the year's R. Kelly, whoever it may be (often R. Kelly), in which various individuals who seem incapable of surviving the fact that one might like a song by a bad person have to explain at some perverse length either that the artist in question (or the lyric or etc) is not actually "bad," or that the song in question is not actually "good." The amusing part is that these two sides are certain they have contrary stances—that they represent antithetical cultural ideas, the I hate hate speech team and the ...but life really ain't nothing but bitches and money team. And yet these are fundamentally identical stances, in the context of art criticism: a need for the ethics and the aesthetics of art to be coherent and continuous. As they surely will be, in utopia. This year the action will concern the Ying Yang Twins et al. And perhaps R. Kelly, though I think the initial shock about the vulgarly majestic scope of the Closet Project may have worn off and folks are slowly recognizing the similarities with, say, Sigur Ros. Just as the Icelandic twits don't make hypnotically form-breaking pop so much as dull classical music, R. Kelly's cycle is not elastically grand narrative pop, it's medocre light opera.

Meanwhile, if you have one of those CD players that can be programmed to play only the odd-numbered songs, you'll discover that the Liz Phair record is really pretty good. Not Top 10 good, mind you...

cutting room floor

Here are a few unused quotes from my conversation with Slavoj Zizek; the used quotations appear in this column in the Village Voice.

....I’m almost tempted to be honest here. It started with you, New Orleans, Katrina, but now we’ve got it in Europe, it’s already curfew in some cities in France. The antagonisms of capitalism are too strong for capitalism itself to resolve them in the long term. I don't think we can simply repeat Marx, but my attitude is negative, in the sense that the existing system has fateful limitations. It cannot go on indefinitely, it will get destructive....

....This is all babbling. I give you the right to invent quotations, to make up anything for me to say. You're my Minister of Information....

production/dissemination/consumption

Regarding the relation between the NYTBR and the selling of books, asked after recently by M. Cahiers, there are even more vectors of mediation than 'Dette suggests. It's not just that some relatively significant potential audience is likely to know the name of some poets basically if-and-only-if they've encountered said name in the Paper of Record; it's that, as I recall from my years at the Independent Bookstore of Record (back before it moved uptown), lots of stores actually base their weekly ordering on what's reviewed in the Sunday Boook Review. We got our copies on Tuesday (and yes, we sold them separately) and then called in our orders to the distributors, weighting them only slightly based on how positive or negative was the piece.

So a review actually gets books onto shelves. The publisher then counts these as sales, until they're returned, should that happen. Which, with poetry, it sometimes will—but not always. And in a genre where the difference between disappointing and decent sales for a substantial release is maybe 600 copies, a Times review can matter to a disturbing degree.

For those who worry about such things.

okay, define "care"?

Country Music Comes to Town: Did anyone in New York care? wonders famed, ahem, editor Deniel Menaker over in Slate today.

Answer: not enough to get Matraca Berg's name right; in this article about New Yorkers' inability to engage with one of the United States' two great contemporary indigenous musical forms, she appears as "Metraca Bird." Fact-checking? Saving the program? Just plain knowing the names of major songwriters in the first place? Well, nothing says "caring" like indifference.

No big deal; she's only written a few songs.

[update: the crack team at Slate has corrected the last-name howler, but seen fit to leave the misspelt prenom intact; one can only care so much, one supposes]

the count

I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized ever since I started working, um, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me—that’s on the worst day of my life.

By which I mean, today I read a subhed in the PoR: “one of the deadliest three-day periods since the American invasion.” And I thought to myself, gosh, that phrasing sounds familiar. So I searched the Times for articles over just the last year that included all the words deadliest, since, invasion, and Iraq. This is a fairly stringent request; it won’t find “most deadly,” or pieces that only name Mosul or Falluja, or anything concerning “the deadliest week over the last 12 months” and the like. Even with all these limits, this particular fact has been news 20 times since last Thanksgiving.

Turning the corner? We’ve turned a score of corners; we turn one about every 18 days, and all they have in common is that each is more deadly than the last.

né Kosmos

Review in the NYT of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos. The essay's approach is a little fancy, more interested in the history of ideas than history as such, but it doesn't mistake the novel terribly: one of my favorite books, and one read well before grasping much of the literary theory to which the author refers. It is not in fact a novel that requires any specialized knowledge to read, unless patience for the slow narrative—the comically horrific nervous paralysis that descends from, say, Auto-da-fé and perhaps as well from Musil; this must have something to do with mitteleuropa's charnel-house modernity, no?—is "specialized." I don't have a lot of it, but Cosmos (my edition is called Kosmos) kept me in it long enough to get hooked, and then transfixed. If books are supposed to make the world around you shiver (and I'm not sure this is their purpose; they are good as well for flattening posters that have been rolled away in a tube since you last moved), Cosmos had me shuddering for days.

Franklin says

Briefly: “Adolescent boys” was dumb; I do not generally agree that a willingness to discuss cultural and psychological features of political events automatically constitutes a reactionary “refus[al] to think politically”; I fell asleep the second time I tried to see Star Wars. With that, I move on to political violence. I apologize for the fact that the discussion will seem schematic and abstract.

I assume that ethical concern “for others” includes and assumes concern for members of oppressed classes; an inegalitarian view, on which some persons are “worth” more than others, is indefensible. Given that, the acceptance of extreme forms of political violence in pursuit of change becomes a live issue. By that term, I mean the form involving the killing (or life-altering debilitation) of persons who aren’t directly and obviously agents of oppression; I leave aside skinned knees, property, or on-duty agents of state power.

What must revolutionaries accept, to support such violence? First, that killing can be an acceptable means to an end. (I assume it’s not an end in itself.) If you reject the notion of an “economy” of violence, you’ll disembark here; suppose we don’t. One must then accept that:

(a) The end is worthy.
(b) The means are effective.
(c) No other means are at least as effective.

(a) A totally just society is a worthy end, if anything is. Where local or “partial” gains in justice are at issue, this is less clear; or should be for the “total” revolutionary, who must now explain why some “gradualist” goals, such as a change in status within an (ultimately unjust) civil society are worth pursuing. Achieving such goals might be a phase toward the ultimate end; but so might phases of state domination and control. The “total” revolutionary might as well take up arms on the state’s behalf. Resisting this conclusion requires accepting some degree of gradualism.

(b) Assuming the French rioters are pursuing a worthy end (partial or total, and admittedly unclear), is political violence an effective means to it? Both sides, I think, should agree that the answer is not obvious. For my part, I haven’t seen how isolated, seemingly “random” acts against Anglo-French individuals serve any tactical or strategic goal one might supply. Frustration (and even joy) is effectively conveyed by symbolic property violence; revenge is inutile and is likely misdirected. Massive escalation of such violence might have efficacy; but might also be counter-productive, both in making partial goals such as civil recognition less attainable, and in provoking the superior, as things stand, force possessed by the state.

(c) Could other means, life-respecting ones, be as effective? This is the question of liberalism. Here, I must remark on a feature of Josuha’s rhetoric. Given that there are difficulties (resting on failures of imagination) in describing the totally just society, and empirical evidence against the idea that a society claiming to be organized along principles he advocates will be totally just, Joshua is frank and consistent in calling his hopes and thinking “utopian.” On the other hand, those who hope or believe that worthy goals might be pursued by means other than political violence are gripped by “fantasy.” The first of these hopes is about an end, the second is about means to that (or some other) end. Beyond this, both hopes outstrip present evidence that they may be realized; to this extent, the difference between “utopian” and “fantastic” is largely connotative. This, I feel, is a push; and if one believes that partial goals have sometimes been effected non-violently, some will feel that the liberal wins in a tie.

But: Other things being equal, why should there be any preference for life-respecting means, “fantastic” of not? I cannot answer this fully here, but I will point to a consideration. Lives, unlike bits of property or perhaps opportunities, are not resources which can in any obvious way be traded or redistributed. A related ethical point is that they should not be treated as such. That they are, as things stand, often so treated, and that this is bad, are central to any version of Marxism that I can understand or begin to accept. One need not hypostasize “rights” to life, or speak of human nature, to make this point; I speak merely of the sort of value – which may not be all that it might -- that the lives of actual men and women, of whatever class, have to them here and now. I suggest that any Marxist should countenance this thought, even if ultimately rejecting it on means-justifying grounds.

What should the French rioters do? They should engage in symbolic property violence if that is their wont; they should agitate, both chaotically and with focus, for worthy partial goals including recognition, redress, and redistribution. Above all, they should act in ways that make it more likely, not less, that other groups (most immediately, other French workers) will recognize their common interests and participate in their struggles. Life-respecting means will be at an advantage in the last pursuit. If a point is reached at which a “totally” worthy (or much less massively partial) goal can be pursued effectively only by means of the sort of violence I have discussed here, it is conceivable that the concerns sketched above will fall away. But I do not see that the groundwork has been laid.

spectres of "law"

"As means, all violence founds or preserves the law" — Jacques Derrida

coming tonight

Tonight, under the heading "Franklin says," I'm going to post without comment a statement of Franklin Bruno's as a sort of punctuation to recent debates about events in France; he is doing the same for me, on his blog. We won't be reading each other's notes before posting.

The idea is for each of us to make space for the other to state their position clearly, and — if not finally or completely — without it being trapped in the cycle of he said/he said.

revolting developments

The Village Voice essay/linkology has been translated into French by charming French Republicans (a term which bears about as much resemblance to U.S. Republicans as banlieue does to "suburb") ; francophonistes can find it here.

exclamation points: not just for O'Hara!

Parents, be with your children in the face of the police, not against them! Amnesty for the children.

"a corpse in their mouth"

•) Pretty sure I'm not the one who brought up Rousseau.
•) Pretty sure it's not irrelevant that, of the two people singing the praises of Hobbes this morning, one employs it as a muddled case suggesting that a recognition of violence in the world somehow makes one not a pacifist, but is shocked, shocked that the true subjects of world violence might not be pacifists...and the other is David Brooks.
•) Re this: "Most such people...," well, it just stays funny. For in this usage it can mean nothing but that one is "smart" and "decent" if one believes as I believe. And yet, somehow, this doesn't come with a recognition that one is simply ventriloquizing class interests. I'll let Barthes handle it: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
•) And re this, "Like Hobbes, I believe that we all get what we want (except adolescent boys?) not under the conditions of war but of peace," well, I want a house with a backyard for my son to play in, maybe in Westchester. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a war to get that land. What's that you say? It's already been fought on my behalf, years ago? And we won? Huzzah! I'm so totally a pacifist now!
•) Or tell it to Frederick Douglass: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."
•) But I'll return to a previous request, and with that, remain silent on this debate until it's answered: "please include in your conversation a proposal for how the actual humans living as perpetual subjects of state violence ought behave, in your measure."

clarification and another analogy

I suppose this is always worth saying: I should state clearly that I admire Franklin every which way: as a thinker, as a musician and as a poet, and especially as a decent person. I would like to have him on my side in any struggle. I have no hesitations about any of these things. I simply disagree with his analysis, strongly. And insofar as that analysis risks taking on not the particularities of his insight but the generalities of a certain convention of thought I find worth disputing, dispute it I will, with every passion I can muster.

I recall, during the O.J. Simpson trial, a rather jaw-dropping discourse between Alan Dershowitz and Elaine Scarry (not Catherine MacKinnon, as previously posted; correction courtesy my mom). Dershowitz produced a lengthy series of statistics toward the legal formulation of "reasonable doubt"; the numbers demonstrated quite clearly that a very small, tremendously small percentage of women who were battered by their husbands were actually killed by them.

At which point Scarry inquired, "How many were killed by someone else?" As it says in that book by Led Zep's road manager, end of anecdote.

I would invoke a similar line of reasoning in response to Franklins' clustered critiques of the riot-as-politics (though I also think that his urge to psychologize the events, and remove them endlessly into some realm of family dynamics, shows the horizons of the current line of political critique pretty clearly: these aren't political events, because I won't think about them politically). It is absolutely true that a very small, tremendously small percentage of riots have led to larger insurrectionary events conducted by citizens against their state.

How many were precipitated by something else?

[I trust this question won't be flattered by the sophistry of noting that big events have multiple causes, a consideration as self-evident as it is nugatory]

undersea world of Locke/Rousseau

If we are bound to exhume the body of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we could at least not misuse it cruelly. A brief passage from "On Political Economy" that might resonate with recent events more honestly:

Do we wish men to be virtuous? Then let us begin by making them love their country: but how can they love it, if their country be nothing more to them than to strangers, and afford them nothing but what it can refuse nobody? It would be still worse, if they did not enjoy even the privilege of social security, and if their lives, liberties and property lay at the mercy of persons in power, without their being permitted, or it being possible for them, to get relief from the laws. For in that case, being subjected to the duties of the state of civil society, without enjoying even the common privileges of the state of nature, and without being able to use their strength in their own defence, they would be in the worst condition in which freemen could possibly find themselves....

If a willingness to contemplate violence in any social condition is a mental illness, as one of my favorite poets has of late suggested; and if one's stance both in intent and effect serves to defend not peace but rather the state monopoly on violence; isn't this simply a rapturous request to be ruled by madness, as long as that madness is bound for others? Now imagine that the state violence one underwrites endlessly was directed toward you and your children, on a daily basis; what then of your gracious and tree-lined philosophy?

For those who wish to expound virtuous pacifism, and who wrap themselves in the noble rags of compassion for others, please include in your conversation a proposal for how the actual humans living as perpetual subjects of state violence ought behave, in your measure.

it takes two

My father having been an occasional fim critic, the first time I saw Star Wars it was as a guest at a screening. The six or seven times after that were all me. Not to say that I went by myself—usually with my sister—but I went for my own reasons, and more or less with my own money. We were stranded in a valley town for the summer, and weekend after weekend we would head down to the mall until we could recite the whole movie to each other. Wonder and escape and diversion. We certainly didn't head for the theater so as to be part of a singular historic event cycle. The legion of casual and obsessive Star Wars fans were not a strategic coalition; they were a huge, distributed mass of individuals, with desires and needs that were their own, and were also shaped by all kinds of social and cultural forces. At the level of the kid heading to the movie, we were in it for the relatively cheap thrill; we didn't have any dream of participating in some campaign that would historically reshape not just an industry but the structure of popular culture itself.

But we were part of it anyway, and I guess that's the point. It's not either/or. No one's motives changed the meaning of what we all did. The mass event was our personal desires; they were one and the same.

When someone finds the French rioters non-revolutionary because each lacks the personal agenda to act as a strategic participant in a mass political action—when a critic separates these kids out from political meaning because they are indeed, on scale of the individual, "adolescent boys" with whatever local desires that description means to delegitimate—said critic has failed, at the most basic level, to understand the operation of history. Political change, just like political stability, is driven by the actions of people who don't experience themselves as leaving the house to make revolution, or to maintain the staus quo. The hypostatizing of individual motive, and the refusal of political legitimacy to those who don't perform your model of politics (which always seems to require promising not to hurt you), is standard-issue counter-revolutionary liberalism, bourgeois consciounsess in its purest form. Whether you intend it that way or not.

how bizarre, how bizarre

Baffling note in the Village Voice today: David Ng offers an increasingly insupportable series of assertions about French riots. The article, headlined "CNN Got It Wrong" starts with the proposition that the events have been wildly overreported in the United States. To put it decorously, what the fuck? I watched CNN relentlessly as the riots leapt from Aulnay-sous-Bois and St-Denis to, let me check, 300 other towns and further into Paris proper...and CNN gave me lengthy, multipart reports of a convict who escaped and was shortly caught. He was drunk! What CNN dope I got about French events came almost entirely from a tiny and occasional crawl across the bottom of the screen; when they actually provided on-camera coverage, it was to reassure Americans that tourists were safe. In what reality does this count as "American media hyperbole," in its coverage of two weeks of riots that have drawn a curfew devised during the Algerian War and state of emergency, and were replete not just with car burnings but numerous other manifestations including an attempt to batter into a police station with a presumably unlit vehicle? Moreover, since when does the US news exaggerate civilian unrest directed against the state? Generally they do the exact opposite, playing down anti-state action in every western-style capitalist nation. This time, David Ng is helping. Here, by the way, are some French dailies and journals, which would presumably have better facts than the allegedly hysterical US rabble-mongers, and thus conform more closely with Ng's local account.

But this is not the end of the bizarrerie; it's just the beginning. Though the authority of his note is derived entirely from his presence—he's in a café in Paris!—the main fact of his presence is his absence. He determines the importance of the events not by going to the action, but by not going to it; his decision to take a pass on the largest civil unrest in France in 40 years is justified by the fact that it was really just a tempest in a teapot, though this is concluded not before he decides to hang out downtown, but after. "But now," he writes, "with the riots finally winding down, the café culture's reluctance to engage the riots—its choice of distance (or what the French call recul) seems the right response to the events of the past two weeks."

There's a name for that logic, I think. Or, to pose it another way, Ng takes his subjective opinion for objective history: I didn't care what was happening; nothing happened. But surely when a reader encounters a reporter whose account of thousands and thousands of poor and colored kids, spread across a nation, burning cars and battering police stations is, in brief, nothing to see here, move along, pay no attention to the news behind the curtain, that reader might find him- or herself a bit skeptical, no?

my friend gulag

Stalin's devastation is often used to discredit the ideas of Marx, willfully ignoring the fact that Stalinist and Marxist ideas are not only discontinuous but quite often mutually exclusive.

To take one example dear to recent debates in TCOTB (this corner of the blogosphere), Marx is certain that art expresses historical conditions while, contra, Stalin's socialist realism poses art as able to impress itself on those conditions, agitprop designed to condition the consciousness of the historical actor. Art, in other words, can get people to behave in certain ways. Along with the wingnuts who sue Judas Priest for contributing to teen suicide, and blame Marilyn Manson for Columbine, that's what Joe Stalin thinks.

Oh, also David Brooks.

The Times' very own wingnut proposes, in a column you're supposed to pay for, that the riots in France are actually caused by gangster rap's aesthetic hegemony. Not my word, his:

The images, modes and attitudes of hip-hop and gangsta rap are so powerful they are having a hegemonic effect across the globe.

Here, however, is his critical apotheosis: In other words, what we are seeing in France will be familiar to anyone who watched gangsta culture rise in this country. You take a population of young men who are oppressed by racism and who face limited opportunities, and you present them with a culture that encourages them to become exactly the sort of people the bigots think they are — and you call this proud self-assertion and empowerment. You take men who are already suspected by the police because of their color, and you romanticize and encourage criminality so they will be really despised and mistreated. You tell them to defy oppression by embracing self-destruction.

It sounds so reasonable, so sane — until you realize he's proposing that gangster rap's worldview, in the US and France and elsewhere, might actually be, you know, invented out of whole cloth just to put evil images in the minds of folks who otherwise would be good tax-paying Christians. That it couldn't possibly be about something; that it's not conceivable that it might resonate with an audience exactly because it's about something that's already true in the world. Chuck D's "CNN of Black America"? Men die every day for lack of what David Brooks swears isn't contained there.

Brooks' fantasy is doubly extraordinary. It's a totalitarian wet-dream (sublimated as concern) about the power of the image-sphere, its ability to maintain its mind-bending force even as it floats free of history itself. At the same time, it offers an utter contempt, paternalistic and elitist, for the denizens of daily life about whom he purports to care, who couldn't possibly be having a recognition about their own lives in the art they choose.

Soldier on, columnist of steel!

bake sales etc.

I look forward to the day when, after a film about a poet, they feel compelled to let some huah poet write a boring repugnant essay about how it isn't really like that. "My poets never stole the tips off the counter at Tom's Diner..."

link'n'park

Over there: sugarhigh! readers may enjoy this quick, link-heavy note on riotography at the Village Voice website. Click below for the full entry.

"The “Neuf-Trois” (a postal code for St-Denis) is Compton and Queens rolled together just north of Paris, home to hardcore hip-hoppers including Supreme NTM. Nique ta mère may be slang for “fuck your mother,” but their best album translates as “Paris under bombs.” That’s the sound of the suburbs around here...

"France imposing curfews under emergency law as rioting spreads to nearly 300 cities and towns"

Here we must recall the etymology of curfew: Middle English curfeu, from Old French cuevrefeu : covrir, to cover + feu, fire.

And while we're delving, the headline that gives this entry its title deserves another annotation: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight." — Walter Benjamin

"How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it?"

"the content of the town is our pleasure"

"It was a good excuse, but it's fun to set cars on fire," said Mohamed Hammouti, a 15-year-old boy in Clichy-sous-Bois, sitting Sunday outside the gutted remnants of a gymnasium near his home. Like many people interviewed, he denied having participated in the violence.

banality of revenge

"This is just the beginning," said Moussa Diallo, 22, an unemployed French-African in Clichy-sous-Bois, the Parisian suburb where the violence began on October 27. "It's not going to end until there are two policemen dead." He was referring to the two teenage boys, one of Mauritanian origin, the other Tunisian, whose accidental deaths while fleeing a police identity check touched off the violence.

clarity of purpose

Rampaging youths have attacked the police and property in cities as far away as Toulouse and Marseille and in the resort towns of Cannes and Nice in the south, Lille in the north and Strasbourg to the east.

site notes

You'll have noticed the gray-tone redesign of the last couple of days to accompany the domain shift (linkers, please use www. janedark.com); I've also added a lengthy poetry blogroll to the right. It's formatted so that, once you've visited a site, the link here appears lighter in shade and struck through, as if the poetry blogs of the world formed a big to-do list. This formatting does not indicate the availability, value of, or any other data about the blog in question.

fixing fire with fire

Jordan points at this thread, concerning the information boom's increasing demands on the resource of human attention.

It's a perverse spectacle: ideology distilled so finely that it appears as a sort of madness. After identifying technology as the source of these spiralling attention-demands (we all have too many RSS feeds! please help us!) the only thing that the threaders can imagine is some new technology that manages the information better for us ("personalizing" filters are popular fantasy).

One doesn't wish to see indulged the dream of somehow abandoning technology, retrogressing to some moment of pastoral peace (that never existed; a side-oddity of this discussion is that no one ever points out its enduring popularity: speed of the world, mechanized shattering of organically whole consciousness, tell it to Wordsworth, de Quincey, etc. Why, it's enough to make one sympathetic to Marinetti!)

But perhaps there could be something other than the modeling of what it means to have impassable horizons of thought — perhaps someone could offer the plain insight that, say, the demands which seem to be made by technology are rather made by human institutions with powerful interests, and that these interests in turn will remain, inextricable and determinate, in next iterations? "Mystification," anyone? What can't be thought at any cost: that the "technology," the object, isn't a thing with interests of its own, but a relation among people, and that if the nature of that relation isn't changed, the objects won't do it on their own.

This particular example is compelling is its clarity: almost immediately, the comment box starts to fill with notes from people hawking their software to solve this attention problem, or usefully directing readers to essays about how companies can gain competitive advantage by catering to the concerns of the attention-short. Yes, I am quite certain that this problem, of the consciousness overburdened by demands not its own, can be addressed in such manner, and is in no way a result of such pursuits.

It's a bit like watching an animal in a lucite box that's concluded its blood is being sucked and, certain that it can reach all the possible solutions, nonetheless decides again and again to address the problem with a Crazy Straw. And the straw vendors keep sending helpful suggestions...