jane dark's sugarhigh!

"contagious shooting"

50 Shots Fired, and the Experts Offer a Theory

It is known in police parlance as “contagious shooting” — gunfire that spreads among officers who believe that they, or their colleagues, are facing a threat. It spreads like germs, like laughter, or fear. An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too.

The phenomenon appears to have happened last year, when eight officers fired 43 shots at an armed man in Queens, killing him. In July, three officers fired 26 shots at a pit bull that had bitten a chunk out of an officer’s leg in a Bronx apartment building. And there have been other episodes: in 1995, in the Bronx, officers fired 125 bullets during a bodega robbery, with one officer firing 45 rounds.

Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning. According to the police account, five officers fired 50 shots at a bridegroom who, leaving his bachelor party at a strip club, twice drove his car into a minivan carrying plainclothes police officers investigating the club.

The bridegroom, Sean Bell, who was to be married hours later, was killed, and two of his friends were wounded, one critically.

Apparently this contagion is rarely spread by white targets...

déjà vu

The amusing and the troubling thing about Enemy of the State were the same thing: that the glossy, staggering surveillance tools of the NSA were operated not by grizzled spies or desk veterans but still-adolescent video-game weasels (an uncredited Seth Green, Jack Black, and less colorful sorts) who might otherwise have been apprentice derivatives analysts, sitting around hi-fiving and still adjusting to their haircuts as they zeroed in on the Fresh Prince.

Déjà Vu is the Scott/Bruckheimer team's return to Enemy of the State, with couple notable exceptions, most obviously that "the State" is now the good guys, and their implausibly panoptic, futuristic surveillance technology is no longer sinister-going-to-murderous but neutral-going-to-redemptive. The operators are now pleasant, concerned, diverse; a kinder, gentler technocrat. Sweet sixteen's turned 31; 1998's turned 2006. Shit happens. Things change.

But you know what they say about things changing. It's still a movie that images total power as having the totality of images at one's disposal, and moreover, in this film's turn of the ideological screw, having access to them as reality. There's a book or two about this lying around somewhere. Even if the achingly slow among us are still discovering that this is fascinatingly metacinematic (I almost suspect this reviewer's lighbulb moment of being satire about credulous film critics, but alas, he seems so excited at this new idea! Has the Voice in its parlous reformation taken to hiring Rip Van Winkles?), it's not a film about film; it's a movie that struggles, rather ineloquently but not too boringly, to figure out what might count as plot in the era of total information awareness, while pasting a candy heart on the sleeve of the PATRIOT act. At least it is in some way of its moment.

Thus the last irony, which is that Déjà Vu pretends to be ahead of its moment, presenting a surveillance environment not yet in existence. Of course, so did Enemy of the State — but did anyone really doubt that technology was already in use in some bunker, and would be publicly offered soon enough? Fiction is just the beta build of fact. And Enemy of the State was merely the first official release of Google Earth Cinema; this must somehow be good news. By our calculations, we have no more than a handful of years to wait before we can download Google Time.

casino royale

After 53 years of James Bond; after an opening sequence rehearsing how he became a double-oh and got his license to kill, which is finally the great taboo exception on which the series is based; after all the ritualistic reiteration of formulae that establish "the Bond movie" as a genre unto itself with its own structuralist consistency despite finally empty changes in actors, characters, names, settings, political situations, historical backdrops; after the relentless repetition of Bond's drive to devour both enemies and lovers who inevitably wish to devour him equally; after all this, it's hard not to wonder if the underlying desire that's sustained the interest in the franchise concerns cannibalism, you know?

borat

While Da Ali G Show's bumbling host visited largely with politicians and entertainment-media figures, Borat visits with "ordinary Americans." Ali G's racially puzzling "voice of yoof" threatens that the mystery of his manner is both generational and cultural, while Borat's difference presents itself as national.

Which is to say that, as has been well-noted, Borat gets it larfs from the drama of hospitality: how far some Americans will go, and how brief a journey it is for others, to accommodate the faux-Kazakh's inappropriate behavior. This has the social appeal of seeming to make a general account of life in these United States, and I'm sure we're only fifteen minutes away from some hipsterdemic leveraging the Borat oeuvre into an MLA paper via the obvious technology of Derrida's late thought on hospitality, neighbors and gifts.

This will probably be interesting, possibly more interesting than the movie, which is pretty flat: Borat's various hosts have varying responses, but the tenor of the laffs-at-their-expense never changes tune (indeed, Borat's targets align him decisively with the Coen Brothers' "let's mock the rubes" cycle). As a result, the main source of dramatic tension in Borat's satire is closer to that of reality TV; we're consistently left to wonder whether episodes are "real" or "staged" or somewhere in-between, an uncertainty which these days is a marginal value at best.

Ali G's satire of discomfort, conversely, bypasses the generalized social critique for something far more specific. Borat, you see, is a stranger; Ali G is a possible voter, promising access to a larger class of same (the category of "voter" sometimes appears as "audience"; a thin allegory if at all). Borat discovers what absurdities "southerners" and "frat boys" will abide and exhibit so as to be hospitable. Ali G tests what Newt Gingrich, Christie Whitman and Pat Buchanan will do for votes and/or market share, and this is almost infinitely more incisive, discomfiting, and substantial: politics, not "the political."

notes from all over-esque

§ An unlikely-but-welcome source for Kelis remix mp3s: Franklin Bruno. In case you hadn't heard, Mr. Bruno has of late switched blogs from semiprivate Imagined Slights to semipublic nervous unto thirst, in what seems to be a sort of experiment in the fate of the diaristic and the materiality of the fantasy audience.

§ I challenge you: Michiko Kakutani's review of the new Thomas Pynchon novel seems calculated to clarify the enduring fog of her dislikes into an incisive moment, a hat in the ring of Best Insult Review Ever. The opening graf:

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Study questions: When did Michiko ever argue in favor of the "rewardingly complex"? Also, who here thinks Michiko really ever took a Quaalude? (Maybe back when it was Mandrax; anyway, tell your copy editor that brand names take a capital letter near the start.) The review itself, naturally, reads like a the sort of imitation of a Dale Peck review that a dogged but ungainly fan of that hatchet man's might...well, you get the idea. We have no judgment of its judgment, having not read the novel under review; however, such is scarcely necessary to point out that the review's stance that Mason & Dixon is Pynchon's masterwork puts the opinions expressed therein within a particular frame to which the term "contrarian" can't quite do justice. "Dumb" seems closer, or the less wieldy "still panicky about modernism." Such dumb panic leads to its share of howlers, inevitably: "The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces." Linger over that for a moment, won't you? If you find something odd about "drawn" and "plastic chess pieces," that may be a mixed metaphor you're sensing. They don't look like chess pieces, after all. Now, we here at sugarhigh! would have at least hoped that someone — family dog? Quaalude dealer? — would have noted, pre-publication, a passage that appears just three paragraphs earlier. In a flurry of insults familiar from the books sections of third-tier college papers worldwide, Kakutani has already proclaimed that, while Pynchon's novels usually treat characters "merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons." So you mean they're not chess pieces? But you said....! Ooh the surgical virtuosity — and they say the drugs don't work anymore. A truly vicious review will have to achieve more clarity than this, one fears; it feels less like a hit piece than a condensation of decades of Kakutani's ambient hostility and cultural anxiety into, well, a poorly-written instance of ambient hostility and cultural anxiety. Not less foggy, just less of it.

§ Conversely: anyone and everyone can get a free subscription to the latest print-at-work literary micro-omnibus (omni-microbus?), The New-York Ghost, with the greatest of ease, by visiting here. The most recent issue starts with the paranoid rantings of some New Yorker who feels certain his life has been pirated away into a character in the season's literary succes d'estime, pardon our French. Highly regarded.

logicbomb

If one were looking for reasons to be leery of Slate article "Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll," a good clue might be found in the casual background assertion: "George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician." No offense, Mr. Brown! None taken, we're sure.

But this is not the article's topic. It's a discussion of how "sample trolls," like "patent trolls" before them, hustle about acquiring rights to pieces of music for the express purpose of suing or settling with musicians (or their corporations) who have sampled these pieces, or hope to. The example in this case is Bridgeport music, which just turns out to be some guy named Armen Boladian, after an easy buck:

Since 2001, Bridgeport's shotgun approach has led to many dismissals and settlements, but also two major victories. First, in 2005, Bridgeport convinced Nashville's federal appellate court to buy into its copyright theory. In that case, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune "Get Off Your Ass and Jam," changed the pitch, and looped the sound in the background. (The result is almost completely unrecognizable—you can listen to it here). The Sixth Circuit created a rule: that any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Righteous outrage etc etc. No argument here. But Tim Wu's version of the story proceeds from quite an odd assumption:

The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation.

This is a troubled assertion on the face of it, since it assumes something that millions of hip-hop (or music) fans are far from certain of: that copyright is, as a general rule, a friend of musical innovation, insofar as (in the case of hip-hop) the original copyright control of sampling raised massive barriers-to-entry for hip-hop artists, corporatizing the genre and, by many accounts, bringing an end to the form's era of innovation.

Assumptions aside, there is a more pernicious (and more comedically absurd) error in this claim. It proposes that there is no logical connection between the abstraction of "copyright" and the concrete fact of Bridgeport. This is self-apparently false from the perspective of logic, and from the perspective of law. Indeed, the author eventually wends his way to this realization, realizing that people tend to take advantage of laws to make money, rather than using them as vague suggestions about honor. At which point he proposes this or that sort of legal patch. But even in this motion, he turns back as if magnetized toward his basic orientation: copyright is good as long as it isn't perverted. If it could just be made to serve individual artists and not corporate profit-takers — a few small changes, and this little problem will be behind us.

There must be a word for this. For this invocation to never think systemically, historically, at all costs. Surely there is some term for the belief, against all evidence, that laws legislating ownership of ideas, and right to profit, do not tend toward enriching the wealthy while increasingly disenfranchising the remainder? There must be some kind of concept for the ability not to have this thought, and thus to experience the legal system as independent of the people it serves, as being indeed fundamentally disconnected from its manifest outcomes? For assigning each increasingly generalized episode — S&L scandal, Enron, WorldCom — to the bad faith of bad individuals? To not knowing history as having a directionality in which the law participates? No, really, we can just fix it with a patch! We can extract the bad apples!

There's got to be some kind of name for this, like we have a name for phantom limbs and snow-blindness...

the framers

Near the end of October, cognitive linguistics guru George Lakoff, who writes books about how the Democrats can close the framing gap with rhetorically savvier Republican speechifiers, wrote this in The Gray Goose (reprinted at The Huffington Post):

"Stay the course" is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions. Because physical actions require movement, we commonly understand action as motion. Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place -- to the refrigerator to get a cold beer, say -- we think of goals as reaching destinations.

Another widespread — and powerful — metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral. In modern conservative discourse, "character" is seen through the metaphor of moral strength, being unbending in the face of immoral forces. "Backbone," we call it.

In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, "stay the course" evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he'd been acting — and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.

This is perhaps the pivotal case of an idea Lakoff has been hammering for quite some time: the idea that language is connotative as well as denotative, basically, with specifics about how some language is better at motivating unspoken/unconscious images and attendant emotional freight, and thus more capable of persuading people of positions before they can be arbited in the full light of reason. Moreover, in classic cog-sci fashion, these responses are proposed to be more-or-less hardwired, as the cognitive activity happening in the shadows underlying rationality is quasi-automatic. "The laws of language are hard to defy," as he has it. His sense of the nature-of-the-beast quality of these linguistic actions verges on the absolute, and permeates his own rhetoric, as in this not from a year earlier, plumping his own product:

Negating a frame activates it in the minds of hearers, as Richard Nixon found out when he said “I am not a crook” and everybody thought of him as a crook. The very title of my book, Don’t Think of an Elephant makes the point: if you negate a frame, it reinforces the frame.

Charged with certainty about the invariable effectiveness of certain successful metaphors, he concluded that June 29, 2005 piece, "The Democrats can learn from Bush and Rove: Stick to your guns and stay the course." Meaning: get a well-crafted message that sends out the right cognitive codes, shows a clear and strong direction, and don't waver from that. To drive his point home with a rather obvious irony, he again highlighted the excellence of the Bush slogan, which works not just as a specific emotion-motivating phrase but as a general rhetorical strategy. Stay. The. Course.

If the phrase and strategy is such a winner, how did it lose so baldly earlier this month? The Democrats, as has been more than well-remarked, never found — much less hewed to — a vision to articulate beyond entirely vague forms of We're not them; after the election, one still heard the Party Chairman proclaiming "this was a call for a "new direction"; that was our slogan, and the American people have blah blah blah." Meanwhile, "stay the course" turned out to be the albatross around the neck of every Republican candidate, if not the anchor.

So how does a cognitive linguist explain that? That is the conundrum — and the occasion for Lakoff's late October essay quoted above. It turns out that "stay the course" stopped working because the president failed to stay the course in his speeches:

The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

"That is not a stay-the-course policy," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday....Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said "stay the course."

What the president is discovering is that it's not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

This is to say, per Lakoff, that the presidential team had made the fatal error of saying "Don't think of an elephant" (indeed, he repeats wholesale that passage from a year earlier, book title and all). Bush's reversal, his failure to stay the course in his rhetoric, becomes utterly damning:

To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination -- that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to "complete the mission" and "achieve the goal."

"Stay the course" was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses.

Here the conundrum comes into full flower. The phrase can produce only one set of pre-rational, emotional responses. It always works. To abandon the phrase is to doom yourself; as Lakoff himself says, it's this "negating of the frame" that's "fatal." So why would the president even consider abandoning the phrase? Why would anyone trouble to change a successful formula with automatic, guaranteed results?

The answer passes swiftly amidst all framing stuff, and Lakoff buries it in a dependent clause, a bagatelle: "given obvious reality." We would not care to arbit the status of "reality" with Lakoff, insofar as our ideas about it are likely to be so divergent that there would scarcely be grounds for debate. But on this occasion we may find ourselves in a sort of agreement: the phrase "stay the course" stopped working because it referred to historical circumstances that changed. It indicates an idea, and the idea came more and more obviously to suck: to be fatal for bodies, to produce no pragmatic or ideological gains, to indicate a tangle of lies and manipulations.

This is not to pillory Republicans for the morass in the Middle East just now, but to hope to have done with Lakoff's lucubrations. For he himself has conceded, albeit in a three-word aside, that these powerful metaphors work until they don't work anymore; that the response is automatic and pre-rational until it isn't. Despite the scientistic frame that Lakoff invokes about his own studies, it turns out that there's no strong correlation between input and output; that cognitive science in fact can't give a steady account of how connotation works; that while metaphors may be "emotion-laden," there are no fixed (or even quasi-fixed) emotional responses. It may be the case that the phrase "don't think of an elephant" causes one to think of an elephant; how one feels about that elephant depends rather on shifting information about which cognitive linguistics may wish to keep silent, for fear of embarrassing itself.

One last averral. We do not wish to extol the primacy of the fact — to reduce this to the simplicities of Ah, but the real world had its way with language, eh? The historical conditions that changed, largely in Iraq, so as to change for a while the connotations of the phrase "stay the course," can't be reduced to "fact." They too involve rhetoric, spin, symbol management, "propaganda of the deed." The conception of a perfectly real world independent of language seems insupportable, and unnecessary; it's as futile as the idea of a sphere of language tied entirely to wired cognitive functions, fixed within a "frame," independent of the real of history — an idea that Lakoff has himself invalidated, against his own initial claims. Language, it would seem, is a mediation with history, and the way it works will apparently require negotiations at every turn. This is not a fresh proposition, except insofar as it is news that stays news.

The promise, from whatever political position, that symbol management is a total and self-determining reality, a frame that has achieved ultimate closure, has no historical truth — except as a symptom of a quite legitimate fear that there is no outside anymore, no history, no semi-autonomous sphere, no possible form of resistance other than participation at the level of symbol management. This is a basic banality of the spectacle, of course; one takes some small comfort in recalling that the spectacle itself is, if perhaps a kind of fact, necessarily one that is in all ways historical.

no love is not dead

"Ideological purity" is indeed an impossible fantasy. But not a fantasy of some radical leftist position; rather, it's a fantasy that aligns the liberal-progressive with the corporate-conservative — appearing not as a demand, but as a twin foreclosure of thinking. One the one hand, it's longhand for "Stalinism," generalized such that the insult can be used to smear anyone who doesn't accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order. On the other, it's the shorthand of the whisper campaign concerning the lack of this supposed ideological purity, a negative seduction which always runs something like, you're complicit too, we saw working to pay your rent, we saw you buying a Coke, you're not so pure are you, nobody likes a hypocrite so why don't you just accept it and accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order? The fact that some turn this accusation against themselves as a justification of their activities proves nothing other than the proposition that Althusser really had a point when he wrote of the "Ideological State Apparatus."

In its very form, it proposes a Manichaean worldview of the pure/impure — stacked against the former, who are inevitably elites, tyrants, messianic crackpots, and/or hypocrites. However, even if it leaves these suggestions at the level of the implicit, it negotiates the binary via a second binary of impractical/pragmatic, with its rhetoric about striving for possible gains, actual alleviation of suffering, along with the usual apologetic promises to change things from the inside. It's the boilerplate, that is to say, that valorizes the idea of "the lesser of two evils," and proposes its apparent content.

Ironically, such Manichaean thought is at great hazard of finding itself quite contentless. If one first accepts the terms of the decision as being between "two evils" (having foreclosed the only remaining possibility, that of "ideological purity"); and if one will always choose "the lesser" regardless of the content of that position (regardless, that is to say, of its avowed stance on, e.g., military spending, universal health care, or capitalism); then the decision turns out to be purely formal. It finds itself on a slippery slope without any method of slowing its descent; there's no mechanism for knowing when one should stop preferring the lesser of two evils, and think about the entire system of choice in some different way.

An unceasing preference for the lesser of two evils, and for the worldview in which that seems like an accurate description of the choices, would mean that, for example, one would support the Vichy government, insofar as they would be likely to treat the population better than the National Socialists would, even if many concessions would have to be made. Indeed, this was how the case was presented, and it was persuasive to many.

History, alas, has judged these persons harshly: "collaborator" is the term that springs to mind. This is not by way of hurling further invective at the current avatars of "the lesser of two evils," but rather of noting that history is rather clear in showing more than two choices on offer. There were at least three: Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, or resistance. History suggests that, as a general principle, there are at least three choices; there is no crypto-ethical binary. History teaches as well that it requires no ideological purity, nor claim of same, to make the third (or any other) choice; that such choices are humanly (if not ideologically) open to everyone; and that such choices might be seen as supremely pragmatic. They require no test of purity at all, but the merely posing of the question, What would refusal look like, what would negation look like in this intolerable situation?

No matter how gracefully one might distinguish that political constellation from our current conjuncture, this final question presents itself with no less force.

It is perhaps also to-the-occasion to point out that every member of the resistance died (or will die all too soon), just like every Vichy sympathizer, and every Nazi. This includes the poets. Some are buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, or Montparnasse; some are not. Some are remembered; some are not. These are some poets who did not choose the lesser of two evils: Philippe Soupault was imprisoned and Breton fled; Rene Char, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos fought and wrote in the resistance.

No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouth

hereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.

Listen, I've had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.

Love's what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.

Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

Everything's transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouth

But still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

And if some day you happen to think of it

Oh you, exact form and name of my love,

Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,

When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,

or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,

One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,

Or on some rainy day

At dawn just before getting into bed,

Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than any

other man did, and that it's a shame that you didn't realize it.

But tell yourself, too, that there's nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard and

Baudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly dead

women who despised even the purest love.

But as for you, when you die,

You'll still remain both beautiful and desirable.

I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparable

image present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other hand

should I outlive you

Your voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,

The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,

will still go on living in me

Yes in me, a poet who's neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,

Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so well

Have become their equal.

Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn't want to be remembered for doing anything else

he's ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.

weltsystemangst

Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There's something nicely easygoing about it. You've got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people's inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they're still lazing around at the end of a Sunday.

This remarkable passage begins a Slate "diary" by Deborah Fallows, written from Shanghai. The weeklong travel journal takes as its opening gambit the consideration of how it feels to be a good worker. It might be understood as a sort of meditation of a maxim of Adorno's — "Every Sunday is too little Sunday" — but with the values reversed. Adorno wrote:

The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

It turns out that, in Shanghai, Sundays are satisfying — exactly because every Sunday is too much Sunday, and allows one better to keep up with (and, for a phantasmal moment, race ahead of) "the pressure of the demands of commerce." (Here we can't help but recall the Soviet science fiction novel translated as Monday Begins on Saturday).

The caricature of Marxist lit-crit's discoveries — that all writing these days (a couple centuries worth of days) is in some way about work — seems no longer caricatural, but merely quaint: why bother reading for the drama of labor, as opposed to, say, the emotional life of the characters, when these have become one and the same? Moreover, given that this confluence has not just perfected itself but fled the subtext for the text — rendering the concept of, say "the political unconscious" all but moot — why do we need literary criticism at all, anymore? In this passage we find an achieved position of such ideological purity that ideological analysis can be retired.

If any curiosity survives in Fallows' text, it's the seeming lack of specificity. After all, the diary is presumably somehow about Shanghai, cosmopolitan center of the new China. For the purposes of her unfolding of the conditions of her sense of wellbeing, it would seem that any spot in the time zone would do: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Perth. The solution to this polite puzzle comes swiftly; the above-quoted passage is merely the first half of the first paragraph of the first day's report. It completes itself thus:

But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, "OK, gang, up and at 'em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!"

If there is any figure of speech in the entire paragraph, it's the term, "camp counselor." For surely she means foreman, or manager, or factory whistle. But of course she can name everything but her specific job; to do that would be to see it as something limited, something she occasionally is not.

That one displacement aside, the motion of the thinking remains extraordinarily clear about its location. For not only does she identify herself and her happiness perfectly with her fate as pure labor (and isn't happiness, these days, always based on the success of that identification?), but she swiftly moves to identify her specific labor with its general place within, and contribution to, the world economy.

And this is the truly revelatory move — revelatory not in the least, again, because of how consciously and unproblematically it happens. This is why the report comes from China, and it's not simply nationalism in some abstract, patriotic form. One finds oneself in Shanghai, the laboratory and showroom floor of China's race toward becoming the leading regime of accumulation on the face of the globe. Every detail of Shanghai speaks of it, of the race forward; the pockets within the city of of foot-dragging tradition, in their charming difference, speak with equal force of the same race. These details, the sensuous here and now of it, serve to orient you in Shanghai no more and or less than they orient you to your place in the space of flows, the world economy. This is what it means to be a "traveler." To be a world citizen, albeit a world citizen of the managerial class, tied to the currency of the United States.

The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find relief in being always at work; that sense fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work and experience its sufficiency within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital. And this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that this sensation, this happiness that is always melting and resolving itself into weltsystemangst, is an echo of 2001, of the hole punched in the United States' horizon of sight so that it must look uneasily across the map — a view mostly banished after 1989. Indeed, Deborah Fallows' motion from "nicely easygoing" to "a bit of anxiety" begins to narrate something like weltsystemaffekt from the position of the United States over the years 1989-present, ending in this new feeling, this tomorrow-yesterday, this new Sunday of the world.

neoliberalismo: some questions

A suggestive essay in the current NLR regarding a recent national election, including an incidental list ways in which subjects of other countries (in this case Mexico) express their conclusion that voting might not achieve the changes they believe in. When was the last time you blocked a road? Seized a plaza?

Meanwhile, there's also an efficient summary of what it means to be as well a subject of the United States, even when one is a Mexican citizen, as in the case of

...the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, signed in 1993. The treaty eliminated duties on a broad range of us goods, and opened Mexico’s markets to foreign products, ownership and, notably, agribusiness—destroying Mexican small farmers, who could not compete with heavily subsidized American crops. The exodus from rural areas grew not only toward the United States, but also to Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area, to the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo and other places where a living could be eked out through construction work or subsistence trade in the informal economy. In the northern border regions, two million of the unemployed found precarious, badly paid work in the maquiladoras, where transnational corporations profited from NAFTA's lax labour provisions and climate of corporate impunity.

How does your voting practice relate to this history?

anarchisme ou barbarie

Statesmanship was for him a minuet to which specks of dust danced in the sunlight. That is how he justified to himself a politics which even the bourgeoisie at its zenith could not master without seeing through it as an illusion. — Walter Benjamin (from Sel. III, p.214) on Metternich

loin du vietnam (updated)

More news from the plus ça change dept. There is something to be said here about political postmodernity — by which we mean nothing as subtle as the death of the Real or the triumph of the spectacle (either Debord's version, or that of Rumsfeld).

Bob Gates got his start as an apparatchik during the Vietnam wind-down, had to withdraw his nomination as CIA boss under Reagan because of his implication in Iran-Contra, and ascended finally to the spot under Bush pere.

In the nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, we see with renewed clarity that Bush fils' habit of stocking his major posts with players from previous administrations is not some dull oedipal drama, as pseudo-thinkers periodically like to suggest; as an actual thinker once said, "there are, one would think, far more damaging things to be said about our social system than are available through the use of psychological categories." The reshuffling — open, self-reflexive, even comical — does indicate something like the endless circulation of used signs typical of postmodern cultural production; the administration's staff resembles nothing so much as a centerless, fragmented collage of previous administrations, composed of actual bodies. Even lesser (if pivotal) players turn out to be part of this rich tapestry; consider that Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat who delivered the Senate to his party, was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy.

To suggest that the staffing habits of the current administration are postmodern in their open signifying chains, unable to mean much while spastically invoking the hollowed-out quasi-meanings of past years, is only to say that we find ourselves not simply within "postmodernism," or "late capitalism," but the decline of empire — though, as we should be well aware, it will be a long and deadly comedy. Nor does the seeming familiarity and depthlessness of the cast of characters mean there is no novelty in the policies, nothing behind the cardboard cutouts propped up in various cabinet offices.

Indeed, one might take the dissembling of any substance to be one of the tasks of all that ceaseless circulation of surfaces, just as the moments of seeming difference — for is such seeming not part of postmodernity's form as well? — can only refer to their own contentless novelty. If one thinks "Nancy Pelosi, first woman to serve as Speaker of the House," has a nice ring to it, surely one must find, by the same logic, the phrase "Condoleezza Rice, the first African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State" (or Vice-President, or etc) to be even more plangent. But it will have no meaning other than to legitimate the policies it obscures...

the race

It is with mounting nausea that we watch poets race to cast their liberal votes for candidates more conservative than the Republicans they found beyond revulsion twenty years ago — and indeed race not just to feed at this trough but serve the slop. They support abortion by explaining why one should vote an anti-abortion ticket; oppose war by stumping for candidates who supported war at every turn, other than the brief moment when it has seemed politically expedient; propose an ethics which abandons the territory of ethics entirely and can't even produce the pragmatic results it claims. It is at best exhaustion, for which there is no sufficient excuse; at worst it's unpaid labor in perfecting the logic of following orders, for which there's no sufficient punishment.

If our disgust seems magnified, it's because we cherish the possibility that poetry allows forms of thought, of consciousness, which might imagine some retort other than celebrating the chance to eat shit as long as it's only the second-worst shit available.

Not all historical moments are identical, and not all politicans are the same. This moment has had its specificity, and its historicality, and it has been this: when the poets most needed to imagine what might be necessary, they muttered passively of necessity; when the poets most needed to be radical, they were good soldiers.

nostalgia of the infinite

...or an archaeology of the future?

babel

Because we here at sugarhigh! HQ are limited in our grasp, we didn't understand this very complicated and conceptually ambitious film. However, we did mange to glean a couple useful lessons:

• Giving Brad Pitt a smaller role doesn't make him a better actor.

• When crosscutting between a third- and first-person camera to drive home some point via cinematic form comma dude, a director may pretend that deaf people don't experience bass.

• Deaf girls, or perhaps Japanese girls, are hot.

• Air power is the key to victory, just like on the History Channel, and is always on the side of good.

• Somewhere there is a cafeteria made of awesome synth, videogames, and plasma screens, named "J-Pop"; you should totally go there, if you can.

science of sleep

This movie might be imagined as Marie Antoinette seen in a reflecting pool, with some of the appearances repeated, others inverted. If the former is an American film in Versailles, the current title is actual cinema Versaillaise (that is to say, the director was born there; finance capital comes from everywhere, an everywhere that itself emanates from the United States). But both are built on a young lovely tossed naked into the Gallic tilt-a-whirl and forced to make her and his way, respectively — and, of course, both are dreamlives. Moreover, they share the basic quality of incidentally pretending, through their Frenchness (whether it be political history or aesthetic provenance) to a kind of significance to which they are signally indifferent.

That is to say that, like Marie Antoinette, The Science of Sleep is a petulantly slight and directionless movie. Because it's Gondry rather than Coppola fille, the flimsiness is one of whimsy rather than missing affect. Gondry tropes buzz about, inevitably temporal (time travel, reality blurring, memory failure, artisanal model-making); happily, they're separated from the maleficent influence of Charlie Kaufman, the faux-indie film industry's official metanarrative boor, with whom Gondry worked on his previous feature fictions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature. Whimsy in the service of nothing is still better than whimsy in the service of maturbatory fake-inventiveness. And so we get to wander through the whimsy, in search of contentless satisfactions: sexy Gael Garcia Bernal's facial expressions and tone of voice, the cardboard sets, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sexy-is-for-lesser-beings knit minidress, très années Pop. When she's not busy smoking, she makes felt boats and ponies.

Unlike Coppola, Gondry doesn't quite maintain the courage of his lack of convictions, and the film eventually gets a lil heavy, just as — uncoincidentallly — his visual verve wavers; we're still waiting for a film as euphorically formal as his video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World." Instead, we're handed an ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending, or a final descent into delusion? Who cares. The real ambiguity is whether, lacking any idea how to get out of there, Gondry simply replicated wholesale an early Lyle Lovett song on purpose, or by magical accident, as Gael and Charlotte go out on the ocean, on their pony, which they ride on their boat.