jane dark's sugarhigh!

television duration: five paragraph essay

The historical change in television duration can be coordinated by two shows. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon devised multiple-season trajectories of character and story development in advance: a seven year arc toward apocalypse beneath which individual episodes had, as well, relatively discrete narratives — as did each season. In The X-Files, individual episodes strobed between entirely discrete and playing a part in the "master narrative," which was not entirely planned in advance but rather shifted to account for a changing set of details and revelations — necessarily supposing a conspiracy at the highest metaphysical level. This conspiracy at once ordered all possible events and concealed that order from us, revealing them as if accidentally, in uneven dollops (this conspiracy is, of course, nothing other than Chris Carter and "authorship" as such). In both these situations, the fundamental drama of the series is in the tension between episode and arc.

From this coordination, two developments present themselves. One is the hypertrophy of the "conspiracy" model, now exaggerated to the point of farce — such that each increasingly absurd episode might somehow not be absurd, but part of a greater logic. The promise of completion is displaced onto the fantasized master narrative or conspiracy which is deferred season after season, so that the rote revelation/confusion/revelation/confusion sequence of each episode can make some claim beyond its own tawdry manipulation. This farce is called Lost: basically The ReduX-Files with all the lightness gone, with much more expensive production values, worse writing, and much much worse acting.

The other possibility is that the multi-season arc will seize control of the show entirely: a version of Buffy which has jettisoned the device of having discrete episodes within the long trajectory. The risk, obviously, is that the show might get canceled before concluding, leaving all in ruination, since the long story is all. It was against this that Whedon hedged relentlessly, which is why his show remains a half-measure. And it is to this risk that The Wire commits itself absolutely. It could have been a disaster, rather than the greatest show in television history.

The greatest consequence of The Wire (and its companion long-arc shows, many of them having seized the advantage of cable programming to risk the experiment) is a historical inversion. For a long time it was the case that movies were long and television was a short form. The TV show had 23 or 46 minutes for a narrative to complete itself; a movie had 90 minutes, two hours, three! Movies haven't changed (indeed, uncoincidentally, the Hollywood length creep of late-century seems to have begun to reverse itself), but The Wire is about 65 hours long, divided graciously into five location-based chapters. Movies are now the short form, television the long form. About the experience of narrative duration in video games, the results aren't yet in.

Even this is not the greatest achievement of The Wire; that is its incomparable casting of African-American actors (and in at least one case, African-British). It remains a mystery why Hollywood, with its vast budgets, reach, and expertise, can't catch up or even approximate the show's achievement. Except that it's no mystery at all, but rather a fact inseparable from that of duration: because the actors on The Wire will have many hours to develop their characters, they have no need to employ telegraphic acting devices to define their characters within a brief few minutes — a set of stock signals known to every Hollywood performer and ticket-buyer, and in the case of non-white actors, generally referred to as "stereotypes."

quotables

"...dangerous toys from Communist China..." threatens the comically-named Kitty Pilgrim on CNN, encoding in a single phrase the nation's transparent shuddering delight that the Cold War is still on! — but now without any political dimension whatsoever — to be fought entirely on the terrain of the commodity...

best law & order episode ever

Pakistan Police Attack Lawyers at Protest

While trying to ignore the slavering banalities of the sovereignty-theory gang (hey look! that obvious thing we keep pointing out as if it were a revelation: still true!), one notes that this could not get any more embarrassing for the administration, given that Pakistan is now distinctly less democratic than Iran.

Moreover Musharraf has now demonstrably outstripped the supposed sins of Hugo Chavez, meaning that if the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism. Which means, one imagines, that anti-Chavez activity will have to be even more covert. Seriously, he may be the big loser of this martial law, given that the Allende bullet now seems like the only workable solution for capitalismpanik.

boulevard of lost opportunities

Apparently this whole thing is really going to go down without any major news source addressing the resignations with a 72-point banner headline that reads CUT'N'RUN.

old book review

Paris Journal 1965-1970, by Janet Flanner (Genêt)

Flanner's regular reports for take an interesting measure of the era, and are superb for the quotations they preserve. Her style is itself definitive of the journal for which she reports, The New Yorker. Though she certainly has her own habits of mind and maneuver (seemingly half the entries start by noting that it is the such-and-such anniversary of something-or-other), there is little sense of period prose; the cheery pseudo-objective style veneered in delicate ironies could be from the 1920s but isn't, which continues to be the case at TNY today. She hates traffic; is largely indifferent to popular culture but mad for Jean-Louis Barrault, actor and director of Théâtre de France. She is beguiled by Malraux and bewitched by De Gaulle, in whose direction everything tilts. Even the boilerplate TNY strategy of scoring free-thinking points via easy shots at aristocrats works for the General; more than once she takes pains to point out that the ultra-wealthy have rarely supported Gaullist policies or the man himself, which is at once pillories their blind avarice and their inability to confront reality, while propping up De Gaulle as a progressive figure.

Big Charlie was not without his moments. Though not quoted in Flanner's book, he did manage to suggest in 1967 that Israel "is organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions — and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism.'" Well, you know what they say about broken clocks.

Flanner herself is called to politics as frequently by Art as by world events. In 1965 she quotes from Sartre's translation — Algeria still on his mind — of The Trojan Women at the National Popular Theater:

"Make war, mortal imbeciles! Ravage the fields and the cities, and torture the conquered. You will all die of it."

Even in 1968, as the reporter slowly comes to take the Spring events seriously (against her initial and habitual treatment of willful students and factory strikers as particularly French divertissements), she can report only from the perspective of a Generalist — in her Paris, everyone is waiting around to see what De Gaulle will do. And certainly this is not her Paris alone. But her distance from the other city is marked, and that comes painfully clear in the notes filed in this period. Finally, as well, it comes clear that, as much as she worships the General, she is not on his side: longer than any single discussion of the politics, or the events, or even of De Gaulle on television, is her July 11 report on how much the May days will cost the city of Paris to clean up. In high TNY style, she sees the merits and defaults of the aristocrats and workers, of the students and politicians — sees them clearly and without ideology, of which she has no need, being on the side of money itself.

global cities: seeing there

The Global Cities show at the Tate Modern endeavors to take the measure (especially the measure of change) of ten cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, LA, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo, by way of understanding something (but what?) about the ongoing process of urbanization, especially insofar as it might describe the general motion of humanity toward the future.

Much of the exhibit presents itself most immediately as "information" rather than traditional "art" (though there are some thrills often considered to fall into the latter category, some unfamiliar Andreas Gursky photos not the least of 'em). The data is organized by five categories taken to be critically instructive about the situations: size, speed, form, density, diversity. Some of these are revelatory, as in the 3D contour maps of urban density. Dude, Cairo is serious.

But for the most part the show isn't about these things. It's about graphicalization of data as a problem — data that in their implications and scope threaten to overwhelm understanding — and about rhetorics of graphicalization. In thus reveals exactly the horizon of "information art," generally sacrificing the sublimity of what's been called elsewhere "the data sublime" on the pyre of comprehensibility. Perhaps this is a virtue, the opposite number to Fredric Jameson's postmodern art: the art which finally fails to articulate the complex space of late capitalism. At the same time, a museum isn't a library, and shouldn't be. Nor should it be a mortuary with a conceptual veneer and an awesome foyer, which is what the Tate is, for the most part.

The question, then, of capturing both the information and the experience of late modernity, of global cap and life in the ultropolis — of the existential conjuncture of collective and monadic — remains open, even as the Tate show closes it rather mildly. This goes again to gesture at the greatness of Gursky (to whom we shall not link as his affect is lost on these little screens), and the fundamental divide between him and Jeff Wall, who has of late supplanted him as the international photo-hero. Wall is brilliantly self-reflexive, a visual theorist of the social structure of visuality. But finally he speaks to the individual looking at (or for) the singular. Gursky's best efforts are exactly toward capturing the conjuncture, the both/and, the singular eye peering after the always-escaping affect of the world system.

evolution: five paragraph essay

It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.

Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.

After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.

But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."

In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.

a specter is haunting china

reposted from marxists.org

MIA faces very significant challenges

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

Details of the attackers origins [this link is now mysteriously dead — sugarhigh!]

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our collocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

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.

how often will we get to say 'end of an era'...

...and really mean it?

there's a brand new dance

Craig S. Smith, who seems to head the Paris bureau of The New York Times, has proven over the last year to have a mere few journalistic failings; consider the niceties on display in his account of the national reaction to Zidane's coup-de-boule:

PARIS, Monday, July 10 — In the end there was bewilderment, embarrassment and, among some, a sense of betrayal as the national party planned to celebrate France's World Cup victory and a glorious end to the career of France's star player fizzled in a moment of frayed nerves.

France could have used a triumph to boost the national spirit, flagging after a year of social unrest and political scandals. It could have used an unblemished hero, too.

Instead, Zinédine Zidane, the team's star and captain, ended his World Cup performance with an ignominious moment of pique that got him ejected from the game. It was his last game before he retires from international competition.

It is, one supposes, a reasonable attempt to fashion a fabric of national life from the pattern of a single incident (of a piece with the analogical thinking which seems to take on the order of an imperative for the Times, especially in the Op-Ed section); alas, pull on a thread and the whole thing unravels.

First, it is worth noting that "bewilderment and embarassment" do not seem to be the foremost feelings, much less universal ones, here in France. "Curiosity"? Certainly — and its mother, amazement. But if there is an accompanying affect (and there are many), unregistrable delight is probably closer to the truth. When Zidane gave a cable-tv press conference on the 12th, people filled the bars and crowded outside in the streets trying to watch through windows. Zidane soccer jerseys are exhausted at every store — and every store had been stocking more than many.

If Zidane seemed the most famous man in the world after the 1998 World Cup victory, he has eclipsed that now, and not in the form of a villain. He has made the true leap from sport celebrity to folk hero. It's less than a week since Zidane knocked down Materazzi with a single head-butt, and there is already a song about it: "Coup de boule," it's called, by Lipszyc and Lascombes. The title seems to continue, "Zidane il a tapé." It comes with a dance, naturally (one for which you will not require much instruction).

It's too early to measure, but it seems to be the most popular song in the country. It has already entered the charts as a ringtone, and as of this writing has almost certainly reached Number One; the song to follow. This is not exactly what "embarrassment" looks like.

How could Smith have gotten it so wrong? His first failing, a minor one for a reporter, is that he seemingly hasn't actually spoken with actual people — certainly not people in bars, French-Algerians, Marseillaises, immigrants, soccer fans, or anyone with whom we've had any occasion to make chat in the last week (for here there is only one topic, or was, until the bombing of Beirut). Nor, would it seem, has Smith listened to the radio or watched much television. Well, he's merely a journalist after all; he's not Superman.

As a result, Smith finds himself a bit like a reporter in Baghdad's Green Zone, insisting that the war's going well. His general observations about the state of things, though you wouldn't know it from what's written, turn out to be true for a rather small group of people, in a rather fortified area.

This analogy, while crude, clarifies some oddities in his attempts to annex Zidane's singular act to the condition of the national psyche (already an absurdity, a total misunderstanding of exactly what was beautiful about the non-institutional because entirely non-strategic act). Here's the passage immediately following Smith's lede above:

It seemed almost metaphorical for a country that, despite its successes, has been paralyzed by its recent failures. They began with last year's rejection of the referendum on a proposed constitution for Europe [....]

Then came last fall's outbreak of urban violence, which exposed the failures of the country's egalitarian ideals. Finally, the government foundered over a modest attempt to loosen labor regulations. Violence briefly surged again.

"Its recent failures" — but failures for whom, exactly? One suspects that last year's Non vote on joining the European constitution was a a success for some; perhaps the national majority that voted Non? Similarly, this spring's overturning of the CPE might not be considered a failure by the millions who marched, blockaded, and struck against the pro-business measure? As one slogan had it, Travailleurs, étudiants, chômeurs, sans-papiers— tous précaires, tous solidaires! "Workers, students, unemployed, illegals — all precarious, all in solidarity." Well, perhaps not the most elegant slogan; however, a useful list of folks with whom reporter Smith has not spoken, who are excluded from his national psyche.

This finally, is what links the embarrassment over Zidane and the year's "failures": they exist only for a small and perhaps imaginary minority. We can imagine it via all the persons this population does not include, as mentioned above: they are white liberal bourgeoises, sitting in their étage noble apartments and fretting about the decline of civilization, believing all the while that "France" still means them and them alone. They are cranks, perhaps, except, as is quite clear from Smith's measure, they are businessmen as well. It's from within their comically narrow worldview that Smith speaks in the voice of the universal subject, rendering his politics as if they are simply a set of facts, and discovering without much expense of shoeleather what's true for everyone — a truth requiring the fantasy that there is a single national condition, a country of a single mind, which just happens to be that of a few men in suits. And this is true, as long as the nation is limited to a few conversations within the carefully entrenched green zone. Beyond the Belle Epoque fortifications, the love for Zidane, if it must be made to tell a national story, would narrate it rather differently.

oh zidane

Now why you wanna go and do that and do that, huh?

this long gyre or, the rhetorical wonder of the permanent present tense

A prizewinning college essay in The Nation begins a sentence, As the Iraq debacle spirals out of control... (July 17, 2006).

Bodies pile up in morgues as Iraq spirals out of control, reads a headline from The Times (February 23, 2006).

In Iraq the situation started to spiral out of control with the blowing up of the Askariya Shiite Muslim shrine in Iraq on Feb. 22, 2006, our particular favorite from a site named Revelation 13: Saddam Hussein, the former evil dictator of a modern-day Babylon, and the Wars in Iraq -- A Bible prophecy and New Age analysis.

The Nation is no newcomer to the war spiraling out of control: per an editors' note last year, The war has also become the single greatest threat to our national security. Its human and economic costs are spiraling out of control (November 28, 2005).

In all, at least 30 people died Saturday in politically motivated violence across Iraq — stark evidence of a security situation threatening to spiral out of control, according to China Daily (October 31, 2004).

Stanford expert says Iraq spinning out of control, notes a San Francisco Chronicle headline (April 25, 2004).

Rebel war spirals out of control, according to a headline from The Observer (November 2, 2003).

Well, the fear is that this is just a spiral, that this is spiraling out of control, Hassan Fattah, editor of Iraq Today, told interviewers on CNN (August 28, 2003)...

...to which Soledad O'Brien inquired, Is it spiraling out of control?...

notes from all over (arbitron edition)

• In the world of Wikipedia, which just recently abandoned its universal anyone-can-edit policy, additional screen names invented by a user (most frequently to feign support in a vitriolic debate over a disputed page's content) are known as, wait for it, sock puppets, predictably leading to a policy page named Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.

• Priceless first line from Michiko Kakutani: This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name. It's a bit like a review by a pro-life zealot beginning, This is the sort of book that gives abortion a bad name. Now let's make a list of the books that would, in eyes of Ms. Kakutani, give "the Left" a good name. Perhaps one called We're Sorry. Or, We're Moving to the Center. Or one called Liberalism Has No Future Unless It Embraces the War On Terror without Reservation and with Bloody Teeth Bared and Purges Anyone Who Disagrees. No, whoops, that book already exists, and is called The Good Fight, and the Times has given it not one creamy review, but two. Actually, one supposes that any book which presents liberalism as the Leftern front might help the Ms. Kakutani and the Times rest easy.

• The House, Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror further "declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq" [emphasis ours]. These bright lights and sock puppets seem not to know exactly what "arbitrary" means, and use it as if it meant "specific." Existing in distinction to "random" (which would indicate a date settled on without any selection activity whatsoever), an "arbitrary date" would indicate one in which a choice was indeed made, but one without recourse to "necessity, reason, or principle." Which is to say that, per the House's own resolution, it would require nothing more than a reason — "worsening conditions" works for us — to commence withdrawal with honor at sunrise. Yes, we know: the dictionary is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.

excursive notes

• Best use principle: remarkable that the site, with its internal vistas, endless balconies and catwalks, bunkerlike pavilions, irregular outcroppings and overdetermined lines-of-sight, hasn't been consecrated to an ongoing paintball tournament.

• Another way to pose the situation: there are more cafés than there are great paintings.

• "Based on the example paintings, I want to go to the fuckin' niveau supérieur of the East."

• Compare to the Alamo: "race war Disneyland."

• Title of a section of the John Heartfield exhibit: "Battle of Images in Magazines." Possible reasons this couldn't be title for culture in general: none.

• "Passive appropriation may simply be another name for culture."

how not to write: journalism none-oh-one

Should you be called upon to write a longish essay on the Next Big Thing...

...and should you adopt the common strategy (trade name: procatalepsis) of establishing the NBT's exceptionality by stipulating first what's not exceptional about them, in this case their form, like so: The Arctic Monkeys are a fucking great band. No, they don't have some earthshakingly original sound—in the broadest terms, it's much the same funk-tinged postpunk we heard from bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, and Kaiser Chiefs, albeit with occasional fuzz-rock passages that recall the White Stripes...

...and should you then make your essay's rhetorical turn, signaled not once but twice — by a section bar which is followed this lay-your-cards-on-the-table explanation of the argument: So no, it's not the Arctic Monkeys' form that sets them apart; it is, rather, their content...

...you should then not, repeat not, totally fail to turn, nor should you instead immediately launch into a very long paragraph extolling the band's sound — their musical form — as if it reasonably followed from the rhetorical turn, rather than refuting it, like so:

So no, it's not the Arctic Monkeys' form that sets them apart; it is, rather, their content. There's a furious drive to all of their songs (as opposed to just the singles), a righteous energy that can come only from utter self-confidence. Band lore has it that both singer-guitarist Alex Turner and Jamie Cook received guitars for Christmas in 2001, and it's readily apparent that the two of them learned to play guitar with one another, as it's rare to hear such precise and intricate interplay between a band's two guitarists even in acts 15 years older than these guys. The rhythm section—especially Helders—more than maintains the often ferocious pace right behind them. The drummer cites a somewhat surprising source as a band-wide influence: "We were rap fans more at school more than now, but yeah, it's still there," he says. "It still influences in some ways, like for me, it's the drummin'. The groove element, like foon-keh music."

Friends don't let friends write like that. Neither do competent editors. What's up, Village Voice?

did we say 'poetics'? we meant 'film criticism'

In a longish essay about a collection of American film crit, British Film Institute honcho Clive James clarifies the stakes of a variety of debates by tendering two promises. The first is that theoretical approaches are just plain worse:

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.

The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope, and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform — subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level — is to help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.

That The Times believes it gains by reviling intellectualism in the arts is scarcely news; said tendency has grounded certain discussions of the stakes of theory in poetry and poetics (many of which are linked to from within this post). In those debates, the opposite number of theory tends to be a vitalist array of everyday life, immediacy, to-itselfness. James' (ahem) theory, as it creeps up through his weedy prickishness, is that the opposite of theory is observation.

Already this is a useful binary (and please understand that the word "binary" always already means false binary; we can simply save typing time by agreeing on this). It becomes practicallly revelatory as it leads James and us to the second tender:

For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own. The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean War.

On the other hand, no prodigies of acting by Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut," climaxed by his partial success in acting himself tall, convinced me for a minute that Stanley Kubrick, when he made his bravely investigative capital work about the human sexual imagination, had the slightest clue what he was doing. In my nonhumble ticket purchaser's opinion, the great Stanley K., as Terry Southern called him, was, when he made "Eyes Wide Shut," finally and irretrievably out to lunch. Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous movie was serious, and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if first impressions are everything.

But in the movies they are.

The virtue, per the estimable James, of observational criticism — the reason it is finally and irrevocably superior to theoretical criticism — is that it will forever and only confirm for us what we already know, what we flawlessly decided for ourselves without any fancypants hovering over our shoulder. As in, say, physics, the conclusions are already known; now we just need a lifetime supply of observations to justify them.

Let's nevermind the continent-sized hole in the logic (what about observational critcism whose observations dispute our own? what of theoretical readings that confirm our own initial pleasures and displeasures?) We'll ignore this yawning gap because James does, the only way he can: he defines it out of existence. Quicker than you can say "tautology," James proceeds as if we had all already agreed on the definitions: if a thought confirms our initial suppositions, it's an observation; if a thought confounds them, it is theoretical.

Which is another way of saying something that's been said before: theory is what you think, while my aesthetic judgment is common sense.

Which is to say that Clive James and sugarhigh! finally agree: theory absolutely should be excluded from film criticism, music criticism, poetry, poetics, politics, and every other sphere — if one is satisfied with rendering the tastes of a certain population as objective truths, and if one is satisfied with being limited to endless variations of whatever set of observations can be seen to achieve this objective.

explication du texte

Today's New York Times writes:

....That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members. [1]

From the beginning, French unions have mobilized people to put pressure on the government instead of simply pressing employers. They have found a willing populace, thanks perhaps to the romantic legacy of the French Revolution. [2]

Because French union organizers do not need the support of a majority of workers at an enterprise to form a union, a small minority of a company's workers can call a strike. When they do, many people take the day off regardless of whether they are union members. All they lose is a day's pay. [3]

But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise [4] and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week. [5]

This is an astonishing bit of journalism; one could spend a day meditating on the whiplash shifts between "fact" and "opinion," or more pointedly, the material and immaterial. Sentence [1] provides the all-important material explanation of why French workers feel able to strike; immediately, the article nervously suggests that they are a sort of docile bunch ("willing populace") who pursue their goals out of a kind of nostalgic abstraction — certainly not out of (just to pull something out of the blue) their own interests in how daily life is lived.

The next paragraph returns to some facts of labor, mystifying them at the same time. While noting factually that employees can join a strike without being part of the union and not fear for thier jobs, the article can't bring itself to note that this is true exactly because previous generations have "put pressure on the government." It then suggests [3] that the loss of pay in return for not working is somehow a strikingly insufficient punishment ("all they lose") — as if there were naturally some ethical dimension to showing up for one's wage job, some divine right that exists in the relation between employer and employed beyond wage negotiations.

With stunning indifference to its own rhetoric, the article in the very next sentence claims that, should the workers believe in some right beyond, whoops!, "wage negotiations," [4] they must be Communists ("workers' paradise": not the sublest code, sir). This villlainous spectre, when forced to appear in material form in the final sentence [5], turns out to be something like the basic protections that every worker in the world would hope for, and lacks only because their capacity to struggle for them has been systematically broken.

The article just barely stops short of saying that French workers, because of their myopic attachment to "entitlements" (health care is an entitlement, apparently. Can one take seriously a single word of anyone who talks like that?) are worse off and less productive than they are in a country without such roadblocks. Perhaps this hesitancy stems from the Times' recollection that this isn't actually the case.

Here at sugarhigh!, we should be clear: we find modern labor unions to be a revolutionary force only insofar as they mediate revolutions in capitalist production; their historical task is to make sure that increasing pressure on workers — to live less and produce more — is cushioned so that there won't be any substantial overturnings of the great apple-cart. We recall well the slow entry and swift exit of the CGT during France's last great unrest (all of which is why we believe, optimistically, that when Josh Corey writes of a union for poets, he means something far more like collectivity).

That said, it would be an error to suppose that the current labor action in France can be understood purely as a defense of the status quo, a maintenance of "entitlements" already in place. This is what the papers here and in France have endeavored to suggest, repeatedly, over the last week — including the Times, when it isn't paradoxically concocting its nostalgic anxiety about communism. Here are three reasons why not:

• The current issue does not concern some abstracted feeling that one is secure in one's job, a vague sensation that makes the cherries taste sweeter. Everyone (including the Times) admits that it is exactly and specifically the protection from unfair termination that allows workers to have any say in their own labor conditions — both now and in the future. The CPE (the law against which the current strikes are set) is part of an explicit removal of this protection, and thus a crippling blow to the possibility of any postive changes for laborers.

• The current unrest is part of a larger historical moment, which includes last autumn's riots in France no more more than the current debate about immigration and "guest-workers" in the United States — a moment in which the terms of the relationships between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised are being restructured. Each seemingly individual and local skirmish takes its place within an increasingly global confrontation; the rendering of any given struggle as irrelevant or insubstantial serves particular ends.

• It's a bit of nonsense, isn't it? By the same logic, the American resistance to the Townshend Act in the late 1760s was "a defense of the status quo," as was the Boston Tea Party. New taxes had been levied, and the colonists wished them to be unlevied — to return to the status quo, eh? This entire rhetoric is transparently absurd.

We are not suggesting these events are the beginnings of a revolution; likely, they will turn out to have been a systemic adjustment of labor relations as late capitalism seeks out a sleeker body to march across continents. But we remember well that no overturning comes from a single moment of athletic heroism. If the histories of the 1760s in the American colonies, the 1780s in France, the 1940s in India, or the 1980s in the Soviet bloc teach us anything, it is that — even as onlookers inevitably remark on their pointlessness — there must be quite a bit of calisthenics in the public square before any great weights are lifted, or thrown down.

hidden in plain sight

Our collective sorrow at the decommisoning of Franklin Bruno's blog konvolut m is matched only our delight at such periodic revenances as this. I'm happy to post Franklin's notes on the Michael Haneke film Caché, discussed recently on this site. His entire note below.

—————

Ex-blogger Franklin Bruno here. Jane graciously agreed to host a few additional comments on Cache; these don’t add up to a complete reading, much less an argument, and are not especially meant as responses to Jane's own discussion.

1) One criticism I’ve encountered runs: What, we’re supposed to hold Georges (Auteuil’s character) culpable for his actions as a selfish six-year-old? I think this question is misplaced, at least as a way of dismissing the drama, and especially the political allegory. What the film (and, if Haneke is successful, the viewer) passes judgment on is the “mature” Georges’s incapacity to respond in the present to past events set in motion by his agency – in his name – except with defensiveness, belligerence, and dishonesty. This much is obvious, as is the extension of the charge to Western democracies. A thornier point, perhaps, is that it’s left massively unclear how a more appropriate response would look. But that, as I understand it, is the logic of Haneke’s work. He’s not terribly interested in how his bourgeois characters (or audience) might “put things right”; his brief is to mete out a fated and merited punishment – in this case, a largely psychic one. Asking anything else would be like expecting Sally to reject Harry.

2) Haneke’s not thought of as a witty director, but there’s one bone-dry joke here I haven’t seen mentioned. We think we’re watching a broadcast of Georges’s book-chat show, but when the image breaks up, we see that we’re watching the footage being edited, as Georges fast-forwards over a guest’s discussion of Rimbaud – just as he does with the uneventful surveillance tapes he’s been receiving – while commenting, off-screen, “Too theoretical.” In part, this exemplifies one of Georges's subsidiary crimes – the trivialization of the literary. (Speaking of “howling white space,” think also of the blank-spined mock-books of the show’s set, mirroring the unread – unreadable? – wall of volumes that dominates the central couple’s apartment.) But it’s also a moment of auto-critique: an anticipation of viewers’ potential rejection of the film’s technical-cum-diegetic play. If what one values in an artist is an unwillingness to be outflanked, Haneke is your man.

3) Didactic film-making doesn’t bother me in principle – if it did, how could I have sat through Letter to Jane? – but that’s not to say I accept all of Haneke’s demonstrations. Take the scene above, in which a panicky George and Anne (Binoche) attempting to locate their missing son by phone, while the television, set directly between them, displays violent footage from Iraq and, if I’m remembering correctly, Palestine. I presume this arrangement is meant to exemplify the bourgeoisie’s ability to use their blinkered focus on their private concerns as a means of “tuning out” history. For me, this was one spot where Haneke’s critique felt cheap, in that a concern with one’s immediate family, though not universal, is not at present a characteristic that marks the class in question off from others. This is so even within the film’s own terms -- the combination of filial and social solidarity displayed by its Algerian characters is too tricky to unpack here. More generally, all I mean to suggest is that the problem of partiality – whether directed toward one’s “blood,” or some otherwise constituted set of persons – is more complicated than Haneke allows.

4) In the end, I wish I were more convinced that Haneke’s use of the 1961 FLN protest and subsequent massacre to set his plot in motion deserved to be called “historically situated,” rather than “ripped from the headlines” (in the manner of many Law & Order episodes). Though he means to allegorize collective denial, one can still come away with the sense that everything would have been just dandy for this family had Daddy not done something particularly nasty to a particular Algerian forty-odd years ago. The contrast with Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games , in which another similarly-named bourgeois family are tortured and killed for sport by two amoral youths, is instructive. Notions of motivation and explanation, imperatives of the psychological thriller, are roundly mocked as the tormentors present a variety of incompatible and ultimately irrelevant of both “how they got this way” and why they’ve singled out this couple. The political specificity of Cache is absent in the earlier film, but so is the individualized quality that blunts Haneke’s point: This Georges and Anne have “done nothing,” and that’s enough.

annular

Though much of the pleasure must take the form of the negative (um, excuse me, did we really make that vague Madonna song the #7 single of the year, Bright Eyes at 34, and manage not to get Ciara's "1, 2 Step" into the top 40? That is some humiliating activity), it's a real pleasure for me to be reminded that reading through the votes, comments, and mini-essays in the annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll makes one of my favorite days of the year, every single year of my adult life. It's like reading the yearbook of the school you never quite went to, from whence you never quite graduated.

and one more thing

...to add about the Chronicles of Narnia Rap: there can be no doubt that it has replaced unfuckingbelievable as the greatest achievement in tmesis technology.