The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed an ordinance that mandates the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.
This is a step in the right direction.
However, County Executive Ron Sims still refuses to start granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying: “There is nothing I can do. Governments cannot pick and choose which laws they’re going to enforce.” This is an evasion; Sims ought to grant the licenses, and to say, like San Francisco Mayor Newsome, that he is enforcing the equal protection under the law provisions of the state constitution. The state could then be sued if it refused to recognize the validity of such licenses.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed an ordinance that mandates the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.
This is a step in the right direction.
However, County Executive Ron Sims still refuses to start granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying: “There is nothing I can do. Governments cannot pick and choose which laws they’re going to enforce.” This is an evasion; Sims ought to grant the licenses, and to say, like San Francisco Mayor Newsome, that he is enforcing the equal protection under the law provisions of the state constitution. The state could then be sued if it refused to recognize the validity of such licenses.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Well, my new PowerBook arrived today, and this is the first post that I am making with it. (I’m using ecto as my blogging client).
I was a Mac user for a long time, from c. 1991 to 1998; I switched to Windows because I wanted to have a really small laptop, 3 lbs or less — which didn’t (still doesn’t) exist for the Mac. But I missed the elegance and simplicity of the Macintosh aesthetic. Especially as OS X was developed, I felt that I was missing out on something I really wanted (though arguably — or just say, obviously — I didn’t need it, given that Windows XP does just about everything you need, albeit much more clunkily).
So finally, after looking at the state of my finances, and convincing myself through specious arguments that I could afford the additional charge on my credit card, I took the plunge.
The 12″ PowerBook is still too heavy (4.6 lbs) but I’m determined to carry it around with me everywhere anyway.
Well, my new PowerBook arrived today, and this is the first post that I am making with it. (I’m using ecto as my blogging client).
I was a Mac user for a long time, from c. 1991 to 1998; I switched to Windows because I wanted to have a really small laptop, 3 lbs or less — which didn’t (still doesn’t) exist for the Mac. But I missed the elegance and simplicity of the Macintosh aesthetic. Especially as OS X was developed, I felt that I was missing out on something I really wanted (though arguably — or just say, obviously — I didn’t need it, given that Windows XP does just about everything you need, albeit much more clunkily).
So finally, after looking at the state of my finances, and convincing myself through specious arguments that I could afford the additional charge on my credit card, I took the plunge.
The 12″ PowerBook is still too heavy (4.6 lbs) but I’m determined to carry it around with me everywhere anyway.
An interesting article by Eli Sanders in The Stranger (Seattle alternative weekly newspaper) this week points out that King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels have the administrative power to do what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has done: authorize marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, and go to court to force the state to recognize the validity of such licenses. Of course, as Sanders also points out, Sims and Nickels are probably too lame and spineless to actually do this.
But it’s something they really ought to do, they really need to do. One thing that hasn’t been pointed out enough in all the press about the weddings in San Francisco is that social change never happens in a vacuum. Change comes when there is a cascade of events promoting it; it’s only at the very end of such a cascade of events that the law actually changes. The women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, both exemplify this.
Recent events suggest that we have the chance of reaching a similar flash point, or tipping point, for equal marriage rights. Which is why I think that it’s imperative for Seattle, and other cities and localities throughout the country, to follow the lead of San Francisco (and Massachusetts and New Mexico). Politicians who say they want to wait for a more opportune moment (or whose mealy-mouthed equivocations, as in the case of John Kerry, imply such reasoning) need to realize that this is the opportune moment. If we don’t act now, Bush will probably get his odious constitutional amendment.
Not all injustices can be rectified overnight. Women’s suffrage did not eliminate sexism, and the civil rights movement did not eliminate racism. Nor will equal marriage rights eliminate homophobia. But when there is a rush of events opening up the prospect of of (even partial) freedom, it’s inexcusable not to seize the moment.
An interesting article by Eli Sanders in The Stranger (Seattle alternative weekly newspaper) this week points out that King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels have the administrative power to do what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has done: authorize marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, and go to court to force the state to recognize the validity of such licenses. Of course, as Sanders also points out, Sims and Nickels are probably too lame and spineless to actually do this.
But it’s something they really ought to do, they really need to do. One thing that hasn’t been pointed out enough in all the press about the weddings in San Francisco is that social change never happens in a vacuum. Change comes when there is a cascade of events promoting it; it’s only at the very end of such a cascade of events that the law actually changes. The women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, both exemplify this.
Recent events suggest that we have the chance of reaching a similar flash point, or tipping point, for equal marriage rights. Which is why I think that it’s imperative for Seattle, and other cities and localities throughout the country, to follow the lead of San Francisco (and Massachusetts and New Mexico). Politicians who say they want to wait for a more opportune moment (or whose mealy-mouthed equivocations, as in the case of John Kerry, imply such reasoning) need to realize that this is the opportune moment. If we don’t act now, Bush will probably get his odious constitutional amendment.
Not all injustices can be rectified overnight. Women’s suffrage did not eliminate sexism, and the civil rights movement did not eliminate racism. Nor will equal marriage rights eliminate homophobia. But when there is a rush of events opening up the prospect of (even partial) freedom, it’s inexcusable not to seize the moment.
Like everyone else, I kind of wish Nader weren’t running this year. I voted for him last time, but this year the only priority is to beat Bush, with no illusions as to the wonderfulness of whoever replaces him. At this point I am what used to be called a “yellow dog Democrat”: somebody who would even vote for a yellow dog over a Republican. I’d certainly prefer my own yellow dog as President to George W. Bush.
Considering only the major candidates, at this time I prefer Edwards to Kerry, only because Kerry is a walking corpse with zero charisma, and I think that Edwards has a better chance of winning. But it won’t happen; Kerry has the nomination locked up. As I’ve written here before, it’s a peculiar pathology of the Democratic Party that they try to make things as hard as possible for themselves, by going out of their way to nominate the least appealing (indeed, least competent) candidate they can find. Hence Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. Bill Clinton is the sole exception.
Still, though I wish Nader would hang it up instead of making a fool of himself (since his totals are almost sure to be far lower than they were in 2000), I was sickened by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night, who basically told Nader that he was unqualified to run for President because 1)he is unmarried and has no children; 2)he doesn’t drive and doesn’t own a car; and 3)he rents an apartment, instead of owning a house or a condo. I guess parenting, driving, and home ownership constitute the minimum definition these days of what it means to be a “true American.”
And while I’m ranting: has anybody commented on how, at the same time that Bush is trying to stop people from getting married who desperately want to, he is also proposing spending $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money in order to bully people into marrying who don’t want to?
Like everyone else, I kind of wish Nader weren’t running this year. I voted for him last time, but this year the only priority is to beat Bush, with no illusions as to the wonderfulness of whoever replaces him. At this point I am what used to be called a “yellow dog Democrat”: somebody who would even vote for a yellow dog over a Republican. I’d certainly prefer my own yellow dog as President to George W. Bush.
Considering only the major candidates, at this time I prefer Edwards to Kerry, only because Kerry is a walking corpse with zero charisma, and I think that Edwards has a better chance of winning. But it won’t happen; Kerry has the nomination locked up. As I’ve written here before, it’s a peculiar pathology of the Democratic Party that they try to make things as hard as possible for themselves, by going out of their way to nominate the least appealing (indeed, least competent) candidate they can find. Hence Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. Bill Clinton is the sole exception.
Still, though I wish Nader would hang it up instead of making a fool of himself (since his totals are almost sure to be far lower than they were in 2000), I was sickened by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night, who basically told Nader that he was unqualified to run for President because 1)he is unmarried and has no children; 2)he doesn’t drive and doesn’t own a car; and 3)he rents an apartment, instead of owning a house or a condo. I guess parenting, driving, and home ownership constitute the minimum definition these days of what it means to be a “true American.”
And while I’m ranting: has anybody commented on how, at the same time that Bush is trying to stop people from getting married who desperately want to, he is also proposing spending $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money in order to bully people into marrying who don’t want to?
You can find a list of websites that are making Danger Mouse’s Grey Album available for download at greytuesday.org. WIll EMI Records really be able to shut down all these sites? Illegal Art has had it up for several weeks now.
You can find a list of websites that are making Danger Mouse’s Grey Album available for download at greytuesday.org. WIll EMI Records really be able to shut down all these sites? Illegal Art has had it up for several weeks now.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
