Potentialities, or Could Walter and Martin have been friends?

Earlier this year (about a month or so before squirrel* {BS}), I started again to read works by one of my top two "favorite"^ writers, Walter Benjamin, whose first volume of his collected writings in English I finished in toto last July.  To be sure, I've read a lot of these three collections that I own (I have Volumes 3, 2 & 1 in my collection the first {or the 3rd, depending on your perspective} of which I received as a "gift / bribe" from Malynne at the end of the first course I took with her "Cults of Personality: Hitler, Stalin Mao").  

This second volume has begun with quite a lot of short reviews and happenings-related short pieces rather than the deeper philosophical pieces that he's most known for (if Benjamin can be said to be well known in any capacity).  The reason for this is clear, with Benjamin as a young man in is mid-20s he was struggling post university to find work and publishing these short, timely works wherever he could.  Two such articles published just a couple weeks apart in a couple different newspapers were both clearly derived from one single meeting / conversation / interview with André Gide, and another couple were (very) short reviews of a book by Karl Gröber.  What's amazing to me is not the brilliant extent to which he so brazenly double dips (nor the fact that you used to just be able to do book reports and send them to a publication and get paid for it!), rather it's the way that all of it is dripping with intentionality, but so rarely concerns itself with execution.

Por ejemplo, in Benajmin's interview with André Gide, Gide repeatedly discusses the lecture that he had planned to given while he was visiting Berlin (his visit to Berlin being the occasion of Benjamin's meeting with him), but that he has been so distracted by such visits and because of the nature of Berlin life, "the leisure [he] had counted on never arrived," and he never got the chance to write the lecture. And so, instead of giving a lecture, he just vaguely outlines the ideas he had intended to cover to Benjamin, who dutifully laps them up and writes them up for two separate German newspapers, and his (Gide's) work is "complete". 

I love this concept of doing something just by saying it out loud.  Come to think of it, this is rather the same method of work employed by Peter from my time at MPS, a deep underlying faith that if you just talk about what you want to have happen it will come into being (although in this latter case it involved employing an entire staff of people who were basically there to just try and discern his wishes, and then carry out all of these whims as much as possible). In the earlier case of Benjamin and his contemporaries, the focus is much more on the potentiality of having had a great idea, and then thinking about how great it was, and not concerning yourself terribly with the fact that it never came to fruition.

Another thing that I find compelling about Walter Benjamin is that he is a near exact contemporary of my grandfather, Martinus Kvidt.  Born just 9 months apart, Benjamin on the pre-anniversary of my own wedding on 15 July 1892, and Martin on MKE day 14 April 1893, they were both part of The Lost Generation of their respective countries, and while my grandpa was off to Europe to fight in World War 1, Benjamin was a country or two away studying away at university.  

I'm not entirely sure why, but I have always been interested in synchronicities - the phenomenon of things things happening at the same time in different places (and in different worlds, even - fictional and historical and historical fictional or futural historical...).  For years, I have tried to find (or create) a calendar app that would allow for historical events to be created throughout the past (weirdly, google calendar seems to have an odd glitch {or maybe it's actually iCal that has the glitch} where you can create some events in the far distant past and they will sometimes reappear, so I sometimes am able to re-discover that George McFly was murdered on March 15, 1973 {or it possibly could have been early in the morning of the 16th; anyway the same week as when the Watergate break-in guy was being paid off...} while looking through my calendar, but other times not, as the event appears and disappears unpredictably on my Calendar app).

I like to think about contemporaries in history, art, cinema (like, for instance what was going on in 1999 cinema that made it such a spectacular sampling of content while the history of that moment wasn't especially exciting - although we were on the brink of a lot that would happen in just the next few years and ultimately set up much of what we find around us today...), literature and also to consider the generations looking back at their influences from prior generations (a process that I would have thought I could have generalized as a faster and faster process, with TikTokkers citing Taylor Swift as major influence {some 10 years earlier}, whereas Benjamin and many thinkers of his era largely looked back Centuries, and in particular 150 years give or take to the Romantic Era of German literature {your Goethes & your Schillers, etc.}, but I think this tends to over-generalizing the history of cultural influencers {ikr!?}.

Perhaps the greatest of these Influencers of the 19th Century (don't worry, I'm bringing this in for a landing) is the Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison of his era, John Keats, who died at 25 and then suddenly thereafter became a famous and great poet.  Keats is of course most famous for writing the poem that you read in high school, "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and for aggrandizing the concept of Negative Capability.

 Negative Capability, Keats called when one is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” 

More than anything, this concept seems like the philosophical equivalent of the thinking without necessarily doing life philosophy we were talking about before (rather like the "Harold Hill Think Method" of marching band instruction!, "la-di-da-di-da-di-daaa").

*We had a moment this past spring, where we encountered a full-on squirrel nest in the engine block of our erstwhile Ford Edge, a vehicle that had had (before and after) A LOT of other issues once it was rapidly wandering out of warranty.  It took some help, but we have finally found our way out of that Capitalist death trap, and are generally on to lower and worse things, but at least out of that! 

The eclipse, Hegel, and the American Road

I logged 2400 miles of American roads, 14 hours of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 3 full Brewers game broadcasts (all the enemy radio feed on XM), and 1 total eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided to forgo my Midwestern eclipse experience plans because the weather looked uncertain for optimal viewing.  En route to Deadwood, SD, I listened through the Preface (very familiar!), the Introduction and the early parts of A. Consciousness. 

My copy of Phenomenology was safely at home on my bookshelf, sitting right next to Susan Buck-Morss' excellent Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (which I have read in its entirety!).  I bought a used copy (originally Elizabeth Trejack's it seems) at a book shop in Minnesota.  It was highlighted and underlined in a few very specific sections (it opens automatically to Lordship and Bondage), and otherwise appears largely untouched.

I first learned of the existence of a fellow called Hegel and his friend "Geist" on my first day of classes at the University of Chicago.  I read the greatest hits from Hegel's masterwork, and nodded knowingly when his influence on later theorists was discussed.  On arrival to UW-M, I heard less about Hegel (though there was quite a lot more mention of Foucault, who I only heard come up once at UChicago, and that was in a joke from a Zadie Smith reading about introducing someone at an academic party as "... she likes Michel Foucault and costume jewelry"), but dutifully put Phenomenology and Buck-Morss' book on my prelim reading list.

Naturally, like most good reading lists, I did not read most of most of the books on the list, but excel at the academic art of talking about books you have not read.  I have also not read that book, though I've held it in my hands, and skimmed through bits, and I know people who have read it.

During my long drives of the last several days, I've read through the first 513 paragraphs of Hegel's work, starting and stopping and occasionally paying more and less attention as one is wont to do when reading or listening or existing at all, I suppose.  I think this might be the best way to read Phenomenology, not as one's only or deep reading of the text, but as a way to have read through it all.  As I drove, I would make notes of paragraphs I wanted to return to (don't worry, the highways of South Dakota and Wyoming are sparsely populated, even when there's an eclipse on!).  When I was first reading Shakespeare (or first reading it in college, I can't remember which), someone (either Jerry Davis or Mary Hull Mohr) gave me the advice to "just keep going" when you're reading it and not sure you're absorbing.  It's reading as muscle memory, and the deep read of certain sections can come later (or earlier!). 

Hearing "of Lordship and Bondage" after reading through the entirety of Consciousness changes the focus of the passage.  It makes the easy reading of Hegel as writing the heroic history of Haiti less easy and fancy free.  I've come to trust Buck-Morss, and don't think her reading is at all off the mark.  That said, I think it is important to remain aware of our academic practice of the use of texts to suggest meaning and significance.

*.  *.  *

I first learned of the Great American Eclipse earlier this year, and almost in the same moment committed in my mind that I would be there to see it.  I took a few days vacation, but made few other plans, except to choose Beatrice, Nebraska as my viewing sight.  Tim & Jen & the kids live in Omaha, and actually lived in Beatrice shortly after they got married.  When the day got close, weather across the Midwest started looking dicey, and I headed west.

A total eclipse is an awe-inspiring sight, truly an opportunity to see the most awesome, magnificent vision available on earth.  An eclipse is also a random conflation of events - a new moon that aligns with the earth and sun; a sun for a planet that is about 400 times larger than the planet's moon, which is about 400 times closer than that same sun (so they take up about the same amount of sky space).  Also, we also happen to be in the small window of time, cosmically speaking, that allows this confluence.

I've been struggling to describe what I saw, or what the experience was like, or why it was worth the trip.  Finding significance in the random confluence of hunks of rock hurtling through the galaxy is what we do as humans.  Making meaning from bringing texts, histories, moments - that's what humanists do.  We live in a strange confluence of psychology, philosophy, astronomy, physics, history, sociology, geology, chronology and on and ology.

My thoughts of late have been turning back toward the super-modern, and the importance of the small.  I'm still working at making meaning from the experience of the eclipse, and from reading Hegel on the way to and from seeing the eclipse, and the observations and thoughts I had about Americans and Trump and Mt. Rushmore and history on the way to and from seeing the eclipse.  I expect that I will continue to try to build this meaning for quite some time.

What I learned or have built or have decided for now is that my phenomenology of totality has provided me some perspective on our present American experiment.  We are a strange and strained people, but I still think this is all just crazy enough to work. 

Waiting by the Vent

I'm standing in the hall as my students complete what will very likely be my last UW-M evaluation and it occurs to me that this phase of my life is rapidly coming to a close.

Of course I have my dissertation to complete (pesky detail) and I fully (though perhaps mythically) believe I will land back in the throes of academia soon, and finally (and finely), but my time of first and foremost defining myself as 'grad student' is done.

Oops, they're calling me back in.

#erstwhility

Some thoughts on "Pre-Occupy"

Yesterday afternoon UW-M's Center for 21st Century Studies hosted a Pre-Occupy Symposium, examining various potential roots of #OWS*.  The talks, and in particular the subsequent Q&A reaffirmed my reticence to get much-involved with the world of leftist activism and organizing.  I am, of course, generally sympathetic and supportive (not to mention appreciative) of the work they do, but the conversations become a bit too predictable ofttimes.


***

Update 1/10/13 - I never really got too far with my write-up of the event.  Needless to say, I was somewhat disappointed by the proceedings.  I am, certainly, sympathetic for the radical Marxian desire of those taking part in the event, but the whole imaginarium of the event.  The people presenting at the symposium seem not to live in the same world as most people - as real people.

*Though #OWS is also, ultimately, unsatisfying as a name for the 2011 (and subsequent?) movement, Annie McClanahan's excellent pre-pre blog post on the symposium submits the term for our consideration and I find it a useful catch-all.

Extra! Ordinary! Read all About it...

In his latest collection of short stories, Stephen King puts forth an argument for his own brand of "non-literary" fiction.  Full Dark, No Stars is a grim, harsh book.  The stories are, typical of Stephen King, both hard and easy to read.  They are stories of seemingly typical Americans

Source: Inverse.com

*   *   *
February 2019

Uncle Steve is among my favorite people living or dead.  Since starting this post about his really great collection of short stories, i've subsequently read The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, his (i think still) most recent collection.

King is an exceptional short story writer.  He's also a pretty good epicist.  But unlike this latter, the former is exceedingly rare in modern literature.  King's stories are about something.  They are structured and planned and plotted.

As opposed to contemporary (often self-proclaimed) literary authors, King's stories go somewhere.  They begin and end.  They're clean and tight - rarely any longer than they need to be.  They're surprising and sometimes not.  "The Dune" (in TBOBD) is like an O. Henry and M. Night brain baby.

(When i started this place, i was in my 20s and in a work group of 3 Master's students working on their theses.  Jon was writing about blogs, Paul was writing about Bret Easton Ellis {and in part book blurbs}, i was writing about zombies - and around the same time i was re-reading and writing about House of Leaves.  On my copy of HOL there is a blurb by Ellis, which talks about the greats of horror writing, Poe, King... - i forget the rest - bowing down to Mark Z. Danielewski.  As i was trying to write the sentence about "The Dune", i was thinking all of this and trying to make the O. Henry and M. Night figures do the same to the story...

Which leads me to some alternate names for this blog that i never considered before now:

• Life is in the Parentheses 
• Living Parenthetical

)

I think my other most recent reading of short stories was the collection by April Wilder.  I liked some of them, but they are the epitome of contemporary fiction - Seinfeld fiction.  The stories - the ones i like and the ones i don't - wander around characters without knowing exactly why or where we're headed.  

Not unlike these blog posts i suppose.

In a Sunburned Land

Hello faithful readers!

I am arrived in Miami, living in a condo near Florida International University where I am spending the next 6 weeks studying Haitian Creole.


*   *   *


February 2019
Wow, i seemed so positive and upbeat at the outset here.

On my first night in Miami, i broke the bed.  I was sub-renting an apartment off West Flagler Street near 97th, and staying inamongst the stuff of a Chinese professor who'd left for the summer.  It was minimally furnished, and the bed was a cheaper-than-IKEA structure.  When i first lay down on the bed uncarefully, it cracked, but didn't break.  The rest of the summer i slept sorta spread-eagle hoping to balance the weight so it wouldn't fully collapse.

That summer i saw every movie in theatres.  I ate Papa John's pizza so often that the crew knew me by name.  I ate at Denny's, because they had free wifi.  I had Netflix DVDs delivered to me in Miami nearly every day - because i was on a 3-Disc plan and i was finishing one or more almost every day.  I took the bus (and waited for the bus in the heat, my god, the heat) and got a used bike cheap, which i eventually abandoned for broken next to a gas station. 

But i didn't know all of this when i started this post.  I spent a summer learning Haitian Creole - and learned it well.  To this day i can read and write and understand and speak Haitian.  On my return to Milwaukee, i was asked to return to Mahler, almost magically, and things began, slowly, to turn around.

This was an important summer in my life i think - i still think.  I wrote my dissertation in my head over the course of this summer.  It's every bit as good as it was when i first came across it in the ether.

Untold Richness: A Knee-Jerk Review of Alan Lomax in Haiti

Even on picking up this 10-disc, 2-book boxed set of the music of Haiti recorded in 1936-7 by folklorist Alan Lomax you are impressed by its weight (both literally and figuratively). The front cover sports the statement "Recordings for the Library of Congress". On the back, a sticker on the shrink wrap is the promise of the box' contents, books, music discs, a map with Lomax' original travel notes, and film footage of their visit.

But as with all good boxed sets, it is in the actual opening and exploring that you get most of your value. The first thing you notice opening the over-sized cigar box is the smell. There is a scent of sweet tobacco (already, unfortunately fading in mine) as if the box had been found and repurposed by Lomax himself and sent straight to you from 1937. The Notebook: Haiti 1936-1937 is attached to the cover, in a separate sleeve. The title is handwritten and the book looks like a bound notebook. It is a collection of letters, notes, and commentaries written by (and to) Lomax during his travels.

The second book contains the liner notes, written by Gage Averill and consists of lyrics (translated and in the original Creole), notes and pictures. A foreword is written by Lomax' daughter (?), Anna Lomax Wood and the entire project is impressively intricate and rigorous. The map (as well as two mini-photos, which seem tossed in as an afterthought) provide an oddly exciting tactility to the experience of listening to the lo-fi recordings.

On the whole, the set is an invitation to a lost time, just a few years after the U.S. Occupation ended (1934), and in being transported, you're also given the opportunity to understand that world thanks to the copious notes and commentaries.

Reformed, Refragmentalized, Referential

Note: Loyal RNJ readers will, i'm sure, quickly note that i already posted these ideas earlier, but i think i see them a bit more clearly now, and i'd like to offer them up for comment, ridicule, or questions before i submit them to my (as yet not fully formed) committee.

My prelim areas will focus on the postmodern concept of the fragment, but i'd like to tie this idea of, which i've referred to as 'supermodern' elsewhere, to the 'pre-postmodern' formulation of the fragment as well, which comes through especially for me in the work of Walter Benjamin in the form of the aphorism and short essays. Mostly, though, 'the fragment' or 'fragmentation' is being used as a way to connect seemingly disparate areas of interest for me, namely:

1. Fragmented Bodies - This section, which starts at my interest in zombies - and so, extends itself to ideas about corpses, death, funerary tradition, and display - might more aptly be called "Fragmented Bodies, Fragmented Lives". I want to consider not only the unfortunate case of the zombie, of the undead, of we might term 'bare life', but also the parallel bare life that is stripped bare by human forces, namely that of refugees, of die Flüchtlinge. This section will also consider other implications of zombie theory, such as theories of revolution, consumption, and ressentiment (thanks Patrick). Fragmented Bodies is also the place in which i will explore representations of bodies (mostly dead, but also alive) in film (The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes), fiction, and exhibitions (from Body Worlds to funeral homes). Finally, this representation theory will bring me to the representation of non-human bodies (animals & Cyborgs, for instance).

2. Fragmented Cities - Again, i come to this section through a specific project, namely my interest in urban exploration, but my formulation of urban exploration as an alternative form of tourism gives me a larger body of work in which to place this section. Starting from 'theory of tourism' (Dean MacCannell, for one), i want to explore the concept of redefining and remaking place both from the perspective of the tourist and from the perspective of urban planning (think Milwaukee's Third Ward as one example of this). In a post-industrial economy, former warehouses, factories, and mills are being transformed into places of leisure, luxury, and amusement. A very different kind of rebranding occurs when places and events of atrocity become memorialized. The resulting Museum Kult, the draw of seeking out 'authentic experiences' of history, is a kind of 're-placing', a re-creation of space. The tourist's experience of an actual space of 'historical meaning' alters that meaning. I want to examine this process of alteration.

3. Fragmented Narratives - Finally, i want to look at places where 'pure narrative' breaks down: in postmodern narratives (Think House of Leaves), in frame narratives (and more interestingly broken frame narratives like Frankenstein and Transit), and, finally, in non-narrative forms such as avant-garde cinema. Traditional narrative theory (Noel Carroll? Lewis Carroll?) tells us that narrative is a construction of suspense. A sequence of readers asking 'whatnextwhatnext-whatnext?', but i will also investigate (through Ricouer at the outset, then others) what happens when the reader doesn't necessarily ask this question, or asks it out of fear or desperation (think of a Kafkian-bureaucratic nightmare). Alternately, in a novel of boredom (sorry, Ron), nothing seems to happen next, causing the reader instead to ask something more like 'so what?' (sorry, Professor Veeder).

How's this sound? Can i really go to school for this?

Damn it, I need to yell sooner

After watching Obama's 'not-a-state-of-the-union-speech', i stuck around for Bobby Jindal's "Republican Response" and had a thought, as The Daily Show suggested, Jindal sounded like he thought he was addressing a class of 1st Graders, rather than the general American public.

Now, i've never been one not to talk about the American pubic as if they were pre-pubescent spoiledRotten children, but, seriously, when he followed up Obama's speech, the first serious (if a bit pie-in-the-sky) speech coming from the white House in at least a decade, Jindal just sounded embarrassing.

It's hard work, though, being the arbitor of all that is prescient & cool. The Daily Show takes at least a full day for news to filter down and while i'm sure there are blogs and other 'significant thinkers' satirically stating the state of the state for us, they aren't, i think, quite as sweet-ass-cool as i am.

In other news...
I've got a sense of what my 'prelim areas' will be... Finally. So, evidently, people in my "situation" need to choose 3 'areas' that define their areas of knowledge so that they can then, in turn, sell those areas to future employing universities...

Anyway, i've 'recently' becomed obsessed with the idea of "the fragment" and until today i wasn't quite sure what i meant by that. I mean, i know that i want to think about ideas of the archive and the aphorism and 'the fragment', but so far i wasn't sure how to fit that into a (sort of) system of thought. But i think i've got it... (Prelim 'areas' consist of 3 categories of thought that overlap in your area).

The Fragment
the two areas i've had pretty well sorted out until now are:

1. Fragmented Bodies - This is an area i've been interested in for some time. As a fundamental area, this is related to zombies, as well as 're-constructed bodies' (like Frankenstein stories & cyborgs) and dead, dying, and decomposing bodies (i'm thinking here of things like Brakhage's Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, or similar {ha})

2. Fragmented Cities - Looking, similarly, at decomposing cities, first and foremost through the lens of Urban Exploration, the practice of exploring (and to some extent explaining) industrial spaces that have been abandoned or remodeled. Additionally, the idea of 'fragmented spaces' comes into play (though i'm not sure what those spaces might be)... Places that are, essentially, altered (or 'othered'?) in their experience. Places like tourists sites might be a good place to start

finally, i've figured out a 3rd area that actually makes sense to these other areas and i connect it to particularly the Urban Explorers in area 2, through the idea of 'supermodernity' - which i've discussed before.

3. Fragmented Narratives - Looking at an updated 'narrative theory' that follow's up on Robert Bird's ideas of 'all is narrative' by looking at abstract art and postModern narrative, exploring the way 'time & narrative' is explored in things that might consider themselves 'non-narrative'.

Now, for something completely different...

Hail Hail, the gangs all here

Note: all page references refer to MAPH reader Fall 2005.


In “Ideology and the State” Louis Althusser uses the terms “interpellation” and “hailing” to refer to the everyday reproduction of subjects as individuals. Althusser uses the example of a police officer calling out, “Hey, you there!” to illustrate hailing as one aspect of interpellation. Franz Fanon, in “The Fact of Blackness,” uses a child’s hailing to begin an attempt to create a Hegelian scene of mutual recognition with white culture through various mediums (such as an exploration of Negro culture) which ultimately fails, but in his examination of Negro cultural texts he comes to a moment of interpellation and does find a moment of subjectivity within the boundaries of his own Negro culture.

Interpellation and hailing both refer to the act of becoming a subject, not temporally or as a causal relationship, but as “always-already” subjects. While Althusser frequently uses both terms together, without any distinction between them, hailing refers to a specific aspect of interpellation involving two unmediated subjects, one calling to the other, thereby making obvious the other’s subjectivity. There is no movement toward becoming a subject because “you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition” (Althusser 172). Both the hailer and the individual being hailed are already on equal footing as subjects and the interpellation serves simply to reaffirm that obviousness.

When Franz Fanon attempts to stage a similar scene of mutual recognition in “The Fact of Blackness” he uses a Hegelian-style dialectic to try to become an equal subject in the eyes of whiteness. Hegel’s “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is it exists only in being acknowledged” (Hegel 111). Fanon goes through the steps of mutual recognition, using several different tools to try and achieve it, but at the beginning of the chapter he says “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society…the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (Fanon 109-110). Fanon is ultimately unable to find subjectivity through the Hegelian dialectic because he cannot attain acknowledgement, as a black man. There can be no mutual recognition when his person constantly has to be qualified as a “black friend” or “the Negro doctor.” In order for either Hegel’s or Althusser’s version of attaining mutual recognition to work both of the individuals involved must be able to see themselves as alternate versions of the other, each as an equal subject, and Fanon’s encounter cannot come to that conclusion.

The very first line of Fanon’s chapter can be looked at as an instance of hailing. When the child says “Look, a Negro!” (109) there is no doubt who is being addressed, so according to Althusser he now “becomes a subject…because it was really him who was hailed (and not someone else)” (Althusser 174). And of course Fanon is a subject and always already was, but the instance of Fanon’s “hailing” is also vastly different from the way Althusser describes it. The content of the hailing is very different from Althusser’s “Hey, you” or “It’s me” and while there is no mention of hailing needing to take a specific form, the disparaging nature of the child’s hail makes the two subjects dissimilar. Furthermore, the hail comes from a child rather than a policeman or friend and the child is white, which further complicates the encounter. Because the two subjects involved are so different, each unable to view the other as an independent subject, no mutual recognition is possible.

When Fanon turns to Negro culture as a possible medium of mutual recognition he has already tried and discarded, among other things, reason as a mode of recognition. Fanon says he chooses this “method of regression” out of necessity and challenges “the white man to be more irrational than I” (Fanon 123). He previously had tried to gain recognition by working within the confines of white culture, appealing to science for justification for his equal status, but now admits to regressing and desires to meet as equals on this new plane. Fanon explores poetry, music and tribal practices as rich emotive rather than rational experiences in Negro culture and this attempt momentarily looks like it may work: “At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero” (129). But in the end this medium, too, failed. The inherent inequality shows itself when Negro culture is dismissed as “a stage of development” for white culture. The dominant culture then adapts Negro culture for its own claiming origins of “earth mystics” that are far superior to what they have and taking “a little human sustenance” from Negro culture when they “become too mechanized” (129). In the end mutual recognition is again impossible because Fanon has seen white culture co-opt the aspects of Negro culture that he had tried to use.

Both Althusser’s interpellation or hailing and Hegel’s mutual recognition have at the core the necessity for a subject to gain recognition from another subject. While Fanon was explicitly working, in “The Fact of Blackness” at producing a Hegelian scene of mutual recognition, his chapter also works to illustrate Althusser’s ideas. His reading through Negro cultural texts serves as a perfect example of interpellation. Each response to the various texts—“Yes, all those are my brothers…Eyah! The tom-tom chatters…Blood! Blood!” (123-125)—can be seen as a moment of Althusserian obviousness. In this way Fanon, while ultimately failing in his goal to find mutual recognition among white culture and coming to the conclusion of “Nothingness and Infinity,” does achieve mutual subjectivity with the texts of his own Negro culture.

superModernity

*Note: The following is taken (and only slightly adapted) from a seminar paper of mine for Fall 2008. It examines the idea of 'super-modernity' and fragmentary history... 

 ...as Marc Augé points out in his book, Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, this collecting of fragmentary histories into ‘history proper’ is what anthropological history (which he seems to equate with history generally) consists of. A modern historian, working within the confines of the social sciences, takes a collection (a sample) of personal histories and constructs a narrative from them. This narrative, then, becomes ‘recorded history’. Augé’s concept of ‘supermodernity’ (which operates as something like a ‘happier’ alternative to postmodernity), however, problematizes this ‘final narrative’ due to the fact that the time between history and the present becomes ever smaller. That is, ‘historical events’ need no longer be from 50, 25, or even 5 years ago, instead, the personal event can, in some sense, be aware of itself as historical event. Supermodernity, then, is the coming together of unfathomable numbers of historical events, so that, like in postmodernity, there can exist no over-arching historical narratives. Unlike this postmodern history, however, supermodern history does not dismiss the possibility of the existence of these narratives, these ‘truths’, but only acknowledges the impossibility (or perhaps merely extreme unlikeliness) of knowing them.

Game

**what follows is an extensive definition of the word game, written by me for my 'Theories of Media' class (taught by Professor Tom Mitchell & Professor Mark Hansen), which was not accepted into their elite definition collection (we should come up for a name for that), but was, i think, worth looking at...

“. . . Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.”(McLuhan, 235)

The modern English word ‘game’ comes from the Old English (and Middle High German) word gamen meaning ‘joy, glee’ and from the Old Norse word gaman which means ‘game, sport, merriment.’ The word may also derive from the Gothic term gaman which means ‘participation, communion.’ The common prefix for all these sources is ga- which means ‘together.’

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its definition of the word game, “1.Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport” and “3.a.an Amusement, diversion, pastime” (OED). While these definitions account for the enjoyment and pleasure generally associated with games, it fails to recognize the fundamental connection that games have with rules. Marshall McLuhan says games are “contrived and controlled situations, extensions of group awareness that permit a respite from customary patters” (McLuhan, 243). This definition encompasses both the diverting nature of games and the imposition of the structure of rules on the players. McLuhan also calls games ‘contrived,’ emphasizing the artificiality of the structure of rules. When the OED does address the subject of rules in the fourth definition it describes a game as “4. a. A diversion of the nature of a contest, played according to rules, and displaying in the result the superiority either in skill, strength, or good fortune of the winner or winners” (OED), connecting the rules of the game with competition. Of course, competition is as much a part of games as their diverting, amusing nature, though non-competitive games (cooperative or solitary games, for instance) exist just as surely as games that aren’t enjoyable do. What is essential to a game is an agreement by the players to abide by the artificially imposed rules and structure of the game, to play by the rules.

The verb ‘to play’ is fundamentally entwined with games. This connection serves both to keep the game in the realm of the amusement and to associate the playing of games with the act of a child’s play. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud describes a very young child’s invention of a game. The child would throw his toys out of sight and say ‘gone’ which Freud “eventually realized…was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them” (Freud, 599). The difference between the child simply engaged in the act of playing with his toys and playing a game with them is the imposition of a set of rules for playing. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘language-games’ provide another useful example of a non-traditional way to think about what a game is. Wittgenstein imagines the naming of objects, without providing a context for the use of that object (for example, telling a non-chess player that the king is called ‘king,’ but not what that piece does on the board) as a kind of language game. He then extends the idea of this primitive language as a game to “also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’” (Wittgenstein, 4). Language itself is a collection of arbitrary rules, a code, that speakers of common languages must agree to abide by for communication to be possible.

A player must follow all of the rules of that particular instance of the game (‘house rules’ may apply, but these, too, must be determined before the game) or they are not, strictly speaking, playing that game. “There is, then, a sort of passion that binds the players to the rule that ties them together—without which the game would not be possible” (Baudrillard, 131). Baudrillard argues that it is a passion for the rules themselves that draw people to play games. He goes on to draw a distinction between the rules of the game and the law of the land. While laws are based on a supposed moral consensus, rules are arbitrary and have no meaning outside the confines of the game. “Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to “transgress” a game’s rules; within a cycle’s recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game)” (Baudrillard, 131-2). Laws can be broken or bent and they change through the course of history. While the rules of games may evolve over time, they do not change for the players during any one occurrence of a game.

In pointing out that in transgressing the rules a player ‘simply leaves the game,’ Baudrillard also reveals another limitation of games. “All board-games are limited as to time and space” (Murray, 5). In fact all games are temporally and spatially limited. Another fundamental feature of games is an object or goal at the end of them. A game ends upon completion (or failure to complete) the pre-determined goal. A game also takes place within a certain area, on a board or field or within certain boundaries. A single game cannot take place everywhere at once, but must be confined. In discussing why war is not a game, even though it shares many of the features of games, Marshall McLuhan says that “what disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also disqualifies the stock market and business—the rules are not fully known or accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is too fully [a] participant” (McLuhan, 240). The audience is in danger of becoming part of war, because unlike a game, it has no respect for its boundaries. Gilles Deleuze calls chess a “game of state…each [piece] is like a subject…of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority” (Deleuze, 352). Chess is a game-form of war, though Deleuze argues that the game Go may be a better game of war, because the board (just as the field of battle) grows as the game goes along.

There are virtually endless varieties of games, including: board games, card games, sports, video games, role-playing games, word games (puzzles), online games and gambling. Each of these groups also has its own sub-sets and variations. Archeologists have discovered Sumerian board games dating back to as early as 2600 B.C. and images of ancient Greeks and Egyptians playing earlier versions of games still played today (Avedon, 21). Marshall McLuhan, in his chapter on games in Understanding Media, discusses the differences in the perception of gambling in tribal and individualist cultures. What is deemed a vice by many Western cultures is seen as “mocking the individualist social structure” (McLuhan, 234) because the competition is brought to the extreme. “This further motive is the desire of the anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to heighten his side’s ascendancy at the cost of the loser” (Veblen, 277). Whether money is at stake or not, competitiveness is often at the center of games.

McLuhan claims that games are extensions of social man and as such, the competitive nature in games is a logical extension of individualist social structures. But there are also cooperative games, such as role-playing games and their digital offspring multi-player worlds online. Role-playing games are essentially storytelling games, where one player creates a world for the other players to explore, narrating as the game progresses. Multi-player online worlds are similar, where each player plays the part of some character in a larger narrative, but the world is made up entirely of computer code. While there is some competing and fighting within these games, because players can simply narrate their actions and do what they want, the games are generally structured in such a way as to make it necessary to form a group of players to complete the assigned tasks.

One way that games have extended beyond their basic existence is in the creation of game theory. Perhaps most famously exemplified by the Prisoner’s Dilemma, “game theory is concerned with the actions of decision makers who are conscious that their actions affect each other” (Rasmusen, 9). Game theory is a branch of economics that studies the affects that competitors who are aware of each other have on each other. Game theory takes as its ‘rules,’ players, actions, payoffs and information. These four elements go in to determining possible outcomes for real-world economic situations.

Works Cited

Avendon, Elliot M & Brian Sutton-Smith. The Study of Games. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.

Murray, H.J.R. A History of Board Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951.

The Oxford English Dictionary. (http://www.oed.com/)

Rasmusen, Eric. Games and Information: An Introduction To Game Theory. Blackwell, 2001.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: an economic study of institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a revised English translation. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Malden: Blackwell, 2001.

Assume a Position

As part of my “academic review” at the end of last semester, Andrew Kincaid suggested to me that I write up a series of “position papers” that might function as 30 second – 10 minute summations of my areas of interest. The idea being that I needed to be able to define myself and an area of study, particularly with regards to the job market, but more generally as an academic, and so I present the first, perhaps most general of my position papers for your review. This is a sort of never-ending work in progress, so (as always) comments and questions are more than welcome, they’re absolutely fundamental…

*** *** ***

Why study death?

Death is an essential and fundamental part of all of our lives (one Walter Benjamin calls “exemplary”), but it is an aspect of modern life that we avoid talking about or even thinking about if possible. The modern need to overfill one’s life with events & stuff & people (the modern hyper-busy) is the need to distract one’s attention from death. Entire industries, such as life insurance and legacy investment planning create institutional denial of death by recreating a new, modern afterlife, namely the bank account – the trust fund.

The simultaneous wane of absolute religious authority and development of the ‘self’ in the modern era have created a situation where the game of life (& death) has become unwinnable. Previously, an individual who was dying was secure in the comfort of some version of an afterlife, or continuance, either a religious heaven, the promise of reincarnation or a more ecological dispersal of the body. Additionally, before the advent of the modern ‘self’ a dying person could trust in the continuation of the line through children and the tribe, or even the civilization. This isn’t to say that pre-modern man didn’t see any distinction of the self, but that modernity’s (and especially late modernity’s) emphasis on individual destiny and its insistence on splintering society, separating people from one another makes a collective immortality (or at least survival) less appealing.

There was an earlier time when death wasn’t seen this way. It wasn’t a horror in and of itself. It was scary, perhaps, but it was joked with, laughed at, and most importantly considered. I am interested in tracking these changes, both temporally and geographically and understanding first, whether some fundamental change has taken place and if so, what the implications might be.

Yesterday.

Yesterday started like this:


...and ended like this:


it's good to be home... We got home from Orlando late Monday evening. Today wasn't actually that much colder here than it was at Cocoa Beach yesterday, but ... i had my feet in the ocean yesterday. And a seemingly endless supply of Rum Runners (and fine academic thinking, too, really). The paper went ok. Peter Straub said he wished i'd talked more about the funeral home and, frankly, so do i, but (Norton, looking for a good zombie theory book?) i'll do more in the rewrite.

The spectacle of Universal was a bit disappointing, as was the cultural promise of Kennedy Space Center, but the Hulk was worth the wait... Overall, it was a fine attempt at amateur tourist art...

terribly busy & important...

taking a brief break away from my paper writing (in preparation for my imminent ICFA presentation) i'll share with you my latest "creative" work. A translated poem (from the original Word Verification) as well as an as yet untranslated flash fiction piece...

akrza yanoocy pzkkeh cdidj kzuja ecaoh omaoeax
hcqwk dktxq hjxtp chnubkf
gbhylb fhpts unuia mrked ydszc iwvygjp
ncnzfmu qohyq cyrjzg omgwpo elcugu myhyc nwecc
ylbwvwv stxro

thqrg chbuttg eyyxlx ofrryf qftlko
tpbdrpb xmbcig nfrvxyq eqium wyapce
uokpzfi nbzoqe kkyvh vnxfyf lvgnghp qmpwwma epvndpy urrvcj
ughhgd hfmun oswigaq bimjkx wlomtr ujqgbl
dtkokfa xlpfn jtzfm vfgaa hrqlnue rptxzm ygwlvvq
yvteyrh sguvv ltsdc hmvhwg ofgnudd
rlzbk tckkrk hmvkpkf qseik
equyyqc lwyrjkur
yhqfav lrgruss tqbvaa

ovkwz czypd gsfpk zqhouu qpqoof ctsne
zbwrg cudsuyj yjlrkgm
zbqghj cqjnoxp ypyyjf
qrhuavj swxclu yzwfcte xzema ewfgx
qviian kcocav uuhtes spvrinq awufvji

Grunting laughter cannot express a rape by moonlight.
It takes form slowly, imposingly,
but dies alone, unnoticed under the hot familiar breath
of furious confidence, “At least never again.”
My faith is broken,

let God provide for those who need. Surely
yet another conquest cannot the upset established order
of self-sure unnecessity. Wallowing in individual history
scoffs ancient riddles, loosely entwined with
immemorial power. But others come around
to solving their differences.
Underlying resentment wins out,
but can’t change the course of history [destiny].

Nature tempts us toward and away
with insignificant troubles aspiring
to surface. Obscured, they give
away the sick feeling that rejoined
the hope of completion, not solution.




... and the short short story

hojrph nlpnrx uzukkff vrwbr dzvxlql wpmswl wwsihgg qydpxr swuybu levjao pbqyq fwgrj ggdegzh uwwhd jqtdd ftvsed khcgwsy yspyalu tichmvg uwyygrm jwosa avyrj gxbxhf yhcrz segjb wzpia dyhpt nctwkyr nsnhaov wzzmp fnvtl yarqs lqoop pygbo vwbrufp lgncgl oushel eiwfc ofyjcaj tinmd zuzesdy twmcdpq wlylswi nostwhz, soimuz lreey pqmnrrl kcgcuqb qgdut vajuxk

oh, did i mention i was a crap poet? So, the context for all this is that i'm studying a lot of art centered on process & i post a lot of craigslist ads for my office gig and started collecting and translating those word verification checks as i was posting ads. I kept the original order and then tried to make some meaning out of the individual words i'd translated.

And now, you, too can play. Translate the short story & let me know where it goes... Just a word of warning. It is a bit more laborious than i originally thought it would be. Happy writing...

Toward a Poetic Culture

David Halperin came to speak at UW-M on Friday about Gay Male Culture and it's struggle with finding authenticity in "real" hetero-normaitive emotions... to that i say... this?

a response...

I explored several of the various links in the “Chance, Reason and Dreams” section with varying degrees of frustration. I started with (before last class) the Wikipedia entries on Locus Solus and Raymond Roussel, which were both utterly new to me. And then dug around in the visual/interactive links for some time.

Starting with “Waxweb”, an online film by David Blair, which I watched only part of. The first section was an elongated title of the film called “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees”. This got me started thinking along a line entirely separate from the rest of the film (which is why I abandoned it after 6 more snippets).

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot of Marshall McLuhan lately, and one of the ideas I kept coming back to was his classification of television as a cool medium, a participatory medium. His ‘evidence’ for this is the low quality of the image compared to film (a hot medium), so it seems reasonable that television is becoming less and less a cool medium as the image gets better and better and with the advent of HD television has become a fully ‘hot’ medium.

I think, though, that McLuhan maybe missed what was really ‘cool’ about television, namely its immediacy. The fact that it is shared, simultaneously by everyone who watches it, makes it ‘cooler’. As you sit and watch The Daily Show on your couch and laugh along with it there’s something simultaneously comforting and (maybe) engaging about the fact that it is being broadcast simultaneously to millions of others, that you are ‘getting it’ at the very same moment everyone else is ‘getting it’. There’s, I think, something like an implication of participation in this.

I then went on to check out some of the Flash projects in “Dreaming Methods”, interactive, game-like environments where you can move about, pick things up, read documents, and even add your own writing. While the concept feels more participatory than a medium like television, the limitations of the coding, what you can and can’t interact with end up making it feel like a Scott Adams game.

... and now for some cool stuff to check out...

Section 1: Chance, Reason and Dreams

DADA Online

The site is crudely designed, but has great links to lots of pictures, poems and manifestos!

Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp is one of the most significant artists and philosophers of our times. This is an elegant site with great content, though the interface gets a bit frustrating!

El Lissitzky

The Getty has a great collection of this amazing graphic designer's artifacts.

International DADA Archive

This is an excellent resource! The "Digital DADA Library" is particularly useful.

Brief History of Photomontage

DADA invented collage... read a bit of light background about it here.

Background on Wikipedia

Good background on this great Belgian Surrealist painter.

Dreaming Methods

Fantastic Flash-based projects centered upon dream states and dream narratives.

David Blair's "Waxweb"

Complex hypertextual structure using film snippets to create a narrative about bee keeping. Worth digging in to!

Locus Solus

Wikipedia entry on Locus Solus

Raymond Roussel

Wikipedia entry on Raymond Roussel.

Essay on Roussel

Excellent essay on Roussel's work and good general introduction to labyrinthine style.

More on Roussel

More on this curious author...

Searching for "yourself"

I have a friend, Ron, in the Program who has enjoyed, at times, playing this 'character' during the course of his life here at Milwaukee. The 'character' is a guy who has just discovered the Internet, is just finding all of these websites and who likes to share with other people his new discoveries: "I was at this website and any word i typed in, it would bring up, like, a million pictures of that thing, i mean, literally, a million, man, can you imagine?"

It's an amusing diversion, but it's recently gotten me thinking...am i still the only one whose sort of blown away by this whole internet thing? I mean this sort of seriously...i was googling myself the other day (does anybody else still do this? if not, don't worry, i've probably googled you recently, so i can tell you about yourself or others who share your same name) and first of all, i was appalled to find that google suggests that when you search "joel seeger" you might instead want to search for "joel siegel". This didn't use to happen, but now it's the first result. It kind of verärgers me.

I remember having a conversation with Dave Wake several years back after i'd met a cute girl at an emergency room... I'd googled her to figure out a little about her, which at the time i thought nothing of, but he informed me that "that's a little creepy." I wasn't convinced, but for the most part i desisted in looking up information on people unless i knew them fairly well, it would strategically help me for some reason (e.g. i'm going in for a job interview with them, or something), or i just really wanted to know more about them.

Anyway, i noticed in googling myself, that my Chips columns were still showing up, but no longer on anything resembling the Chips website. Some other site had co-opted them... When i went to investigate (to see if/who i could sue) they had some sort of disclaimer in their "About Us" section that the copyright for the intellectual content on the website is not theirs and their content is 'spidered' from other websites.

Not only am i continually overwhelmed by the sheer amount of 'information', but how much easier it is to maintain personal relationships with the internet. Before the internet, i would completely ignore my friends for months & years on end, miss their birthdays, steal their pants, i would have to make amends, apologize, or return their pants. Now, i can use the internet to find new friends... so much easier.

Occasionally, i enjoy typing in random words into google... Did you know, for instance, that if you search for "yourself" your first result is a site that tells you how to be yourself? Very useful information. Not only that, but the site that teaches you how to be yourself, wikiHow, can teach you how to do any number of useful things, like make deviled eggs. I love deviled eggs.

Posting on the Down-Lo

So, it's saturday morning and i'm at work.

That's right, despite my return to grad school, i've become a soul-less, corporate, sell-out. I come in a couple days a week and play office-guy. They seem to enjoy it & they occasionally give me money in exchange for my time.

So now i'm the kind of guy who wakes up on Saturday mornings and goes in to the office after (for instance) a lively English Department party at the Department Chair's house (which somehow we & the v.cool 'Angy' ended up being the very last people at. One moment the house is swarming with smarmy English majors & professors, the next moment we're in the foyer sipping chardonnay and realizing the homeowners are quietly chatting with close friends in the kitchen and no one else is anywhere to be seen - we slipped out and took our drinks to the street.)

Some Saturdays have been harder to get going than others, but overall it seems to be an ok arrangement. For now, i'll carry on working hard at not working, yet getting paid for it, whilst i simultaneously working hard, not working and not getting paid to go to school and also avoiding work for which i am paid, but don't really have time to do teaching freshmen 'how to write', yet actually not telling them anything.

Get that?

Schedule for the Week

Tomorrow begin my classes. Strictly speaking classes started today, but evidently Tuesday will be my Mahler day, my day off. The first day of English 101 is pretty much scripted out, so i haven't really much to do. I will walk in, briefly perform, and give an in-class writing assignment that lasts the rest of the class. After class i've got another class, this one where i'll be a student. 'Introduction to the Modern' or some such (i've just snuck in, barely). Currently i'm registered for three different classes, though i'm told i only ought to take two (two, i can't imagine what i'll do with myself taking just two classes, the U of C schedule has set me up for a strong feeling of underachieving no matter how much work i'm doing). I'll likely end up dropping my German Lit after 1963 course, which won't be such a loss as i don't think i can take die neuen Leiden des jungen Werthers again. Friday, i'll be looking forward to (after teaching again) another installment of Men's Club. All are welcome to Milwaukee's local chapter, and it should prove to be an interesting crowd. With a crowd ranging from fashion design majors to English PhD candidates with folks scattered in between. In other news, Roman Numeral J is sponsoring another reader contest (that's right another, check the archives). As some of you may know, brooke and i recently came into a Wii. Our collection of Miis is as yet underdeveloped. And so, a joel trivia question (the winner will have an honorary Mii created {a Mii, for you uninitiated, is a cartoonish version of a person that plays various games on the Wii} of them) The question is: What is the most recent alcoholic beverage purchased by joel? For the purposes of this quiz, "purchase can be purchased for me by someone else, but the most recent beverage, whether it be at a bar, liquor store, or guy in a parking lot. The answer will change and will be checked based on time i check answers. As a bonus, if you can also name the brand you will gain an extra Mii (you can choose anyone you like, as long as i know what they look like or you can provide a picture). Ok, good luck, and good luck. Enjoy the coming week, and get your Men's Clubs planned now. Remember, all you need to do is have a few cocktails between the hours of 5 & 7 pm CST (i decree that times move back a bit to accommodate working-ness) and wear a tie (preferably bad).